Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Honors ECE’s Joseph Bardin as an IEEE Fellow

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The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has elevated Professor Joesph Bardin of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department to the level of Fellow “for contributions to cryogenic microwave circuits.” According to the IEEE website, its Fellow designation “is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation.”

Bardin joined the UMass ECE department in 2010. Since 2017, Bardin has also served as a research scientist for Google Quantum AI. At Google, Bardin leads the team working to build integrated circuits for Google’s future quantum computers.  

Bardin received a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2009. He also holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara and UCLA, respectively. From 2009-2010, he was a postdoctoral researcher with the Caltech High Speed Integrated Circuits Group.

Bardin’s research group at UMass Amherst focuses on low-temperature integrated circuits with applications in radio astronomy and the quantum-information sciences. 

As Bardin explains, “We perform basic research on CMOS and BiCMOS integrated electronics to control and measure quantum devices such as qubits, single photon detectors, and THz mixers. A common theme is that our devices are optimized to work at very low temperatures, often in the range of four to 20 degrees above absolute zero.”

According to Bardin, “Designing for operation at these low temperatures is challenging since many device properties change with cooling, and cryogenic models are not provided by the foundries. Accordingly, our first step is usually to generate our own high-fidelity models so that we can predict the performance of our cryogenic integrated circuits.”

As Bardin says, “Once we have our high-fidelity device models, we carry out simulations using standard tools such as AWR Microwave Office, ADS, and Cadence Virtuoso. Once they are designed and fabricated, we characterize our chips over the 4-300 K temperature range using a suite of state-of-the-art equipment. Finally, the most fun part: we share our results with the world!”

Among other accomplishments, Bardin was a recipient of a 2011 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award, a 2014 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a 2015 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program Award, a 2016 UMass Amherst College of Engineering Barbara H. and Joseph I. Goldstein Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, and a 2016 UMass Amherst Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity. 

More recently, Bardin has garnered a 2020 IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society Outstanding Young Engineer Award, an IEEE BiCMOS and Compound Semiconductor Integrated Circuits and Technology Symposium Best Paper Award, and the 2022 IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society Microwave Magazine Best Paper Award. (January 2024)