Mikael Sahrling

Mikael Sahrling is a Principal Electronics Engineer working on developing high speed electrical interfaces for the Test&Measurement and communication industries. He has more than 30 years of experience developing integrated circuits and many of the projects he has been a part of has brought in 10-100 millions of dollars in revenue. Mikael has worked for many of the leading analog chip companies like Semtech Corporation, Maxim Integrated, and Tektronix Inc. where he is the lead Analog Design Engineer. His special interest is in high speed active and passive design with a bandwidth of several tens of GigaHertz.

Mikael earned his Masters in Engineering Physics from Lund University, Sweden, in 1988 where his Master’s thesis concerned the development of quantum transition operators for high-energy gamma rays, a quantum version of Maxwell’s Equations. He continued with a Doctor’s program at Uppsala University in Theoretical Astrophysics where he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1994 with a thesis concerning the physics of dense matter that can be found in exotic objects like Neutron Stars and White Dwarf stars. Mikael then spent two years as a postdoc in the Theoretical Astrophysics group at the California Institute of Technology where he turned to studies of the physics of high-powered electromagnetic fields in dense stars.

While Mikael was at Caltech his old passion for electronics took hold of him and he decided to change his career to do integrated circuit design. His first job was at a small consulting business that specialized in high speed circuit design where Rockwell Science Center in Thousand Oaks, CA was one of the major customers. High speed opamps, traveling wave amplifiers etc. all at > 10 GigaHertz of bandwidth was part of the circuit designs. After three years the small company was purchased by Semtech Corporation and Mikael worked there for three years on fiber communication circuits. After a couple of short stints small design groups, designing narrow-band components: LNAs Mixers, high speed (6 GigaSamples per second) ADCs, Mikael got the opportunity to work for Maxim Integrated where he was a major contributor to Voltage Controlled Oscillators (with industry leading phase noise performance), ADCs, and various support circuit blocks. At Maxim he was part of introducing MAX2335, MAX2547 and MAX2548 to the market some of which are still in active production. These range of products and their sister chips have been very successful in the market place. Following the years at Maxim, Mikael ran a very successful consulting business, Opus RFIC Consultants, with his colleague Hans Hageraats. In tough economic conditions during the recession the two engineers brought in close to a million dollars in revenue. During the Opus years Mikael got in touch with Tektronix Inc and after closing the Opus business Mikael became a Tektronix Inc employee in 2012 where he has been the Lead Analog Designer for the ASIC group since 2017. At Tektronix Mikael and the CMOS design group introduced Tek49, a 4-channel 100 GigaSamples per second ADC and System-on-Chip that is used in the mid-range oscilloscope products.

Mikael is the author of “Fast Techniques for Integrated Circuit Design” published by Cambridge University Press in August 2019, “Analog Circuit Simulators for Integrated Circuit Designers” published by Springer International and “Layout Techniques for Integrated Circuit Designers” published by Artech House in August 2022.

In April 2025 Mikael gave an invited talk entitled “TSMC in the Silicon Photonics Era” at OFC 2025. Among other novel circuit techniques he demonstrated the ability to construct vertical inductors in a true 3D environment made possible by TSMCs COUPE technology. This has the potential of radically reduce the size and cost and improve performance of opto-electrical transceivers.

Mikael lives in Cupertino, CA with his wife and daughter.