Willy Sansen (1943-2024): a true professor has passed away

Our founder and shining example, Willy Sansen, passed away on 25 April 2024. He was a beacon in analog IC design research and education for the past fifty years. He was a true professor: a researcher and an educator.

Willy Sansen, the researcher

Sansen’s research can be summarized as enabling systematic analog circuit design in a digital, CMOS-dominated, world. And that in all its aspects. He’s shown how to start a design from transistor-level models, founded in solid-state physics, move on to larger building blocks like opamps or OTAs, and finally end up in fully integrated analog systems, such as filters, AD-DA converters and all other kinds of analog signal processing blocks. Sansen was one of the founders of this systematic approach, which is now standard practice.