The mentor Philex Fan was a Senior Research Engineer with Arm Research, Arm Ltd., Cambridge, U.K., from 2018 to 2020 before serving a Principal Engineer in TSMC, Hsinchu, Taiwan from 2020 to 2021. Since 2021, he has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Tainan, Taiwan. His research interests span several areas include low-power analog integrated circuits, power management integrated circuits, wireless power transfer integrated circuits, ultra-wideband wireline transceiver, and non-volatile memory integrated circuits. He has authored and co-authored 5 IEEE journal/transactions articles (inc. IEEE JSSC, TCAS-I), 16 conference or conference proceedings (inc. IEEE ISSCC, VLSI-Sym, ESSCIRC, ASSCC, CICC), and 10 US patents or patent applications.

During his time at Arm Research, he was a senior engineer involved in the research project funded by DARPA of the U.S. government (~3.5 million US dollars). Since joining the Faculty of NCKU, he has actively collaborates with leading industry companies in Taiwan on broad research topics and has received research funds of NT$ 18 million (~0.6 million US dollars) from industry, and NT$ 13.8 million (~0.44 million US dollars) from the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), the Ministry of Education (MOE), Taiwan, and NCKU.

Philex has received several awards, include the Taiwan Cambridge Scholarship during 2014 and 2018, the IET Postgraduate Scholarship in 2016, the election of Tomorrow’s Engineer of the U.K. in 2017, the Yushan Youth Scholar of the Ministry of Education, Taiwan from 2021 to 2026, and the Yu-Jen Scholar of NCKU from 2021 to 2023. He also served as a member of Technical Program Committee and session chair of the 2022 Asian Solid-State Circuits Conference (A-SSCC).

The research of Lab 604 focuses on low-power analog integrated circuits, power management integrated circuits, wireless power transfer integrated circuits, ultra-wideband wireline transceiver, and non-volatile memory integrated circuits. The circuits developed by Lab 604 accelerate ubiquitous deployment of IoTs, edge computing, energy-efficient computing, and secure and reliable chip ID generation. The principle investigator, who found the Lab 604 and received a PhD degree from the Cambridge University, U.K. and was affiliated with Arm Research, U.K. and TSMC, TW, joins the faculty of NCKU in the department of electrical engineering since Aug 2021. Before joining the faculty of NCKU, the principal investigator has abundant work experiences in industry including Arm Ltd. in the U.K., Qualcomm in the U.K., TSMC in Taiwan, Cisco Systems, Inc. in Taiwan.

Lab 604 has deep and on-going collaborations with industry including TSMC, Novatek Microelectronics, Himax Technologies, Inc., Macronix International Co., Genesys Logic, Inc., AUO Corp., Leadtrend, and with research institute including IMEC, Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), and with academia including Cambridge University and National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University.