Dias Azhigulov

Dias Azhigulov

Staff Analog Design Engineer

Synopsys Inc.

A little bit about myself…

Hi! I’m Dias, a Staff Analog Design Engineer at Synopsys Inc. working on high-speed SERDES and phase interpolator design in advanced FinFET nodes. I hold an MASc in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UBC, where my research focused on Verilog-A behavioral modelling of Silicon Photonics devices for electro-optic co-simulation. My broader interests span CMOS analog/mixed-signal design, Silicon Photonics, and applied Machine Learning. This website showcases my projects and experience. Feel free to get in touch via email or the contact form below.

Interests
  • CMOS analog and digital electronics
  • Silicon Photonics
  • Machine Learning
Education
  • MASc in Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2024

    University of British Columbia

  • BEng in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 2020

    Nazarbayev University

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Staff Analog Design Engineer
May 2024 – Present Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
  • Tape-out experience in 5nm FinFET for PCIE Gen.7 SERDES: ported and adapted bias blocks, TX driver auxiliary circuits, debug circuits, and 64 Gbps TX-RX loopback design with exposure to FFE VML & CML drivers and RX AFE settings to optimize eye opening. Held design reviews for the aforementioned blocks.
  • Tape-out experience of high-speed TX/RX phase interpolators in 4–5nm nodes. Reduced INL/DNL by 50%, improved aging-related performance (HCI, BTI, self-heating). Co-supervised the block layout, identified electromigration and IR-drop hotspots, and implemented corrective measures.
  • Wrote custom scripts in TCL to measure & compare timings of PnR blocks between HSPICE and NanoTime.
 
 
 
 
 
Graduate Research Assistant
System-on-Chip Lab, University of British Columbia
Feb 2021 – Apr 2024 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
  • Taped out the 1.2V Bandgap Voltage Reference circuit in TSMC65. The maximum PVT variation was reduced down to 28 mV across all PVT corners. Employed interdigitation and common-centroid layout techniques as well as dummy cells for BJTs, diff. pairs, and resistors to improve matching.
  • Created a library of Verilog-A models of Silicon Photonics (SiP) devices for co-simulation with electronics. The library captures laser & PD noise, modulator non-linearities, bidirectional & DWDM signalling, s-parameter based measurement-backed models, fiber impairments (attenuation, dispersion, birefringence), and supports Monte-Carlo simulations.
  • Experience with high-speed (12 Gbaud) electrical measurements on integrated coherent receiver chips and 100G DP-QPSK coherent modulators.
 
 
 
 
 
Optics Engineer Intern
Marvell Semiconductor Inc. Canada
May 2022 – Aug 2022 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
  • Enabled electro-optic cosimulation of coherent link in Cadence Virtuoso by creating a Verilog-A SiP library. Using the library designed and simulated 100 Gbps DP-QPSK coherent link that includes active and passive Silicon Photonics elements and transistor-level drivers and TIAs (45 nm CMOS).
  • Helped in integration and debugging of Synopsys Optocompiler for electro-optic cosimulation.
 
 
 
 
 
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Introduction to Microcomputers, University of British Columbia
Sep 2021 – Dec 2023 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
  • Delivered workshops on Linux and Git to 50+ undergraduate students.
  • Led lab sessions and tutorials involving FPGA board programming using SystemVerilog and ARM Assembly.
 
 
 
 
 
Data Scientist
"Fund for supporting research and development of artificial intelligence" CF
Sep 2020 – Feb 2021 Astana, Kazakhstan
  • Wrote a program in Python that extracts various statistical data about phone call recordings (SNR, speech length etc.) and preprocesses them along with open-source datasets for Automatic Speech Recognition. Used this preprocessed dataset, which is comprised of bilingual speech, to train hybrid HMM-DNN models in Kaldi and achieved 43% WER within 3 months of model development.
  • Built robust scalable address converter in Java via Apache Lucene and Regex. The final accuracy is 91% (i.e. the program can match 91 out of every 100 raw addresses), the time it takes to find matches from database to 10000 inputs is 1 hour. The matched addresses (text data) are then used to obtain their approximate geocoordinates via ArcGIS engine.
 
 
 
 
 
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Data Analytics Lab, Nazarbayev University
Oct 2019 – May 2020 Astana, Kazakhstan
  • Developed a Machine Learning based web application which can in live mode detect different cancers and determine the type of cancers with an accuracy of over 99% based on the images uploaded by a user. Frontend is implemented in Python Flask, Backend is built via Keras and consists of 9 CNNs.
  • Using Python created a website that visualizes the risk of getting COVID-19 in major cities of Kazakhstan. The data is automatically updated each day.
  • Built a pipeline in Python for preprocessing and classifying human brain signals with Transfer Learning as part of Brain-Computer Interface project (72% accuracy, subject-independent testing).
 
 
 
 
 
Undergraduate Research Assistant
iDSN Lab, Nazarbayev University
Sep 2018 – May 2020 Astana, Kazakhstan
  • Designed seven basic SiP logic gates in Ansys Lumerical through microring resonators and heaters. Results are published in several SPIE conferences and in an academic journal.
  • Developed a script in Python for extracting statistical data from 5 torrent tracker websites through HTML parsing. The findings were presented at the CoCoNet 2018 conference.
 
 
 
 
 
Visiting Student
KAUST
May 2019 – Aug 2019 Thuwal, Saudi Arabia
  • Designed several NEM relay-based power converters (DC-DC, AC-DC, and DC-AC) using switched-capacitor topology. Results are published in the ISCAS 2020 conference proceeding.

Projects

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16 Gbps high-speed I/O link

16 Gbps high-speed I/O link

16 Gbps high-speed I/O link over a lossy backplane channel in Cadence Virtuoso (65 nm CMOS)

30 Gbps Silicon Photonics link

30 Gbps Silicon Photonics link

30 Gbps SiP data transmission link in Cadence Virtuoso (65 nm CMOS)

Sub-Sampling LC-PLL design

Sub-Sampling LC-PLL design

Design, Analysis and Simulation of a Frequency Synthesizer using Analog Sub-Sampling LC-PLL (65 nm CMOS)

Two-Stage OTA design using gm/Id methodology

Two-Stage OTA design using gm/Id methodology

Two-Stage OTA design and analysis using gm/Id methodology (45 nm CMOS).

SiEPICfab Shuksan PDK

SiEPICfab Shuksan PDK

Developed from scratch a new PDK using in-house developed layermap and technology files

Single image super-resolution

Single image super-resolution

Built an HDR image upscaling GAN (8x upscaling) in PyTorch using ESRGAN architecture as a reference

Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO)

Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO)

Comparison of different VCO designs for PLLs

6T SRAM memory cell design and layout

6T SRAM memory cell design and layout

6T SRAM memory cell design and layout in 65nm node

Variable frequency divider

Variable frequency divider

Variable frequency divider for PLLs with a logic circuit to switch between different frequency bands

Clock distribution network

Clock distribution network

Designed clock distribution network using numerous buffer stages to minimize the delay, rise and fall times, skew, and power consumption of the network

Wireless Sensor Network optimization

Wireless Sensor Network optimization

Python algorithm for equal distribution of sensors among base stations

Histopathological classification of cancer via Deep Learning

Histopathological classification of cancer via Deep Learning

Automating cancer detection & classification using pre-trained CNNs

Apparent Age, Gender and Ethnicity Prediction

Apparent Age, Gender and Ethnicity Prediction

Apparent Age, Gender and Ethnicity Prediction using Deep Learning techniques

Facetendance

Facetendance

Real-time face recognition system on Raspberry Pi 3 for automated attendance monitoring

Error Amplifier in LDO

Error Amplifier in LDO

Analysis of the role of Error Amplifier in the context of Low-Dropout Voltage Regulators.

Accomplish­ments

Coursera
Introduction to Big Data
See certificate
Data Structures & Algorithms in Python
See certificate
Coursera
SQL for Data Science
See certificate
Coursera
Improving Deep Neural Networks: Hyperparameter Tuning, Regularization and Optimization
See certificate
Coursera
Structuring Machine Learning Projects
See certificate
Coursera
Neural Networks and Deep Learning
See certificate

Contact