In order to promote and focus research activities, the Centre for Integrated Circuits and Systems (CICS) has been formed. The Centre research activities are focused mainly on the design, analysis and integration of electronic circuits and systems in general, and on the design of systems-on-chip (SoC) in particular.

The CICS comprises 3 research group, namely,

Most projects concern the design and analysis of devices, circuits and sub-systems of the final SoC (System on Chip) projects, with or without the embedded software.

RF Integrated Circuits & Systems

Program Director: Prof Do Manh Anh
Tel: 6790 5439

- RF IC design for wireless & mobile communications
- RF characterization & modeling
- EMC/EMI
- Interconnects & packaging for RFICs


The RF Integrated Circuits and Systems group has 5 academic staff, 6 research staff and 23 research students. Its research focuses on RF IC design for wireless & mobile communications, RF modellling and characterization for deep sub-micrometer semiconductor devices, on-wafer interconnects and coupling, RFIC testing, ultra high speed clock-data-recovery, RF System on-Chip, RF System-in-Package, Integrated Circuit Package Antenna, and EMC/EMI in RF integrated circuits and systems. At present, there are 6 on-going research projects with an aggregate funding of some $2 million, the major part of the funding comes from external sources. The major research strengths of the group are Ultra Low Power RFIC designs for wireless, mobile and biochips applications.

Analog and Mixed-Signal IC

Program Director: Assoc Prof Chan P K
Tel: 6790 4513

- Advanced audio systems & ICs
- Analog IC design
- A/D & D/A
- Mixed-signal ICs & sensors
- Low-power analog and mixed-signal IC design


The research activities of the Analog/Mixed Signal IC group are focussed on data converters, low-voltage, low-power mixed signal circuits, and high performance asynchronous digital signal processors. This group currently has a total research funding of some $2 million.

VLSI Design

Program Director: Assoc Prof Chang C H
Tel: 6790 5873

- Algorithm implementation
- Efficient design architecture in hard/software
- VHDL/HDL
- Low-power digital IC design

In VLSI Design and Embedded Systems, the research activities covered a diversity of topics pertaining to the development of novel alogorithms, efficient hardware architectures and design methodologies towards VLSI and embedded application solutions. The group has 2 major projects with a funding of $700,000.