Advisory Board

David A. Rich

Associate Professor, Lafayette College

Following a 21-year career in industry, Dr. David Rich joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty at Lafayette College in fall 2001 as an associate professor, and has maintained an active and productive role in the department. In contributing to the department's efforts, he modernized the curriculum of the electronics lecture and laboratory sequence (in a manner that is consistent with the requirements of industry and top-tier graduate programs), expanded the scope of the junior electronic labs to include MOS VLSI design and layout, as well as electro-acoustical experiments, introduced a senior-level electronics elective in analog- and mixed-signal IC design elective, and introduced an independent study in electroacoustics. He has supervised numerous junior- and senior-level design projects, four honors theses, and a number of student research assistants. In 2003, a member of his research group won first place at the Morton Research Competition, sponsored by the Lehigh Valley section of the IEEE. He is also the faculty advisor of Lafayette's chapter of the IEEE.

During his industrial career, Dr. Rich has held a series of challenging positions with General Instruments, TLSI, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and Agere Systems, with designs of analog and mixed-signal integrated-circuits at their core. Often, his tasks involved novel development of specialized process technology to support high-performance analog and RF circuits embedded in system-on-a-chip implementations. He has been gratified to see many of his innovations achieve commercial success. Most recently, as technical manager of the Wireless IC Products Group at Agere Systems, a chipset of his design was selected to drive the core offering of Sirrius Satellite Radio, a leader in the emerging field of digital radio. Digital radio has captured the attention of the major automobile manufacturers, and its favorable prospects are analyzed in the cover story of the 15 February 2003 edition of Barrons.

Dr. Rich received his bachelor's degree in engineering science from Hofstra University (1980), his master's degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University (1981), and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Polytechnic University (1991). He holds twelve (12) patents, which are frequently referenced, and has two (2) more pending. He has presented his work at numerous conferences and has authored many papers in a variety of refereed publications. He is a reviewer for several IEEE journals and is a member of the Technical Programming Committee of the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), recognized as the leading international conference for integrated circuit development.