Allowing students to give lessons was not an ordinary practice in Iran, where Afshari is from, but his lecturers no doubt recognized that he was no ordinary student. Before graduating high school, he earned a silver medal in the 1997 Physics Olympiad and has since earned a list of accolades that includes the 2000 National Best Engineering Student Award from the president of Iran and first place at the 2005 Stanford-Berkeley-Caltech Innovators Challenge.

The California Institute of Technology is where Afshari earned both an M.S. and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. That’s also where he developed an interest in designing very high speed, integrated analog circuits that could be used in various applications.

While some might think analog is dead in the Digital Age, there will always be a need for a small percentage of analog circuits. Analog circuits are a vital part of networks that rely on radio signals, like cell phones, Wi-Fi, and Wi-Max. And in optical communications, they drive and detect signals modulated through fiber optic cables.

“At very high frequencies, there is no digital solution,” says Afshari. “What I do is design analog circuits for broadband, high-frequency systems.”

Chips made of silicon are great for digital circuits, but not so good for analog circuits, explains Afshari, so what designers usually do when they want very high frequency or high power circuits is use a different material, like gallium arsenide. The problem is, these materials are expensive and not so good for digital circuits. And ideally, everything should be on the same chip, what designers call “System on a Chip” or SoC.

So Afshari thinks up ways to make the analog circuits work on silicon chips. “My goal is to push the boundaries of frequency and power on silicon using the architecture of circuits,” he says. “The solutions could come from other disciplines of engineering that aren’t used much in circuits, like fluid dynamics or optics.”

Afshari has designed an “electrical funnel,” for example, that can collect and channel a large number of small electrical signals into a single high power, high frequency signal.

“I really think analog circuit design is a combination of art and engineering,” says Afshari. “In digital circuit design, a computer does a lot of the work, but with analog, human innovation is required.”