Max Ahmadi, PhD
Bio
Max Ahmadi is a partner and principal engineer at Closed Loop. He is also a professor of electrical engineering at the University of British Columbia and the British Columbia Institute of Technology. He likes hard problems and works directly with the people who bring them to him.
Max reasons from first principles, starting with the physics. In the defence, space, biomedical, and automotive industries, he has been the expert brought in for the hardest part of a program. His areas of work include radar systems, active networks for energy harvesting, resonant wireless power transfer (WPT), and biomedical sensor integration.
Max changed how WPT systems are synthesized. The usual process is trial and error: simulate, adjust, and repeat until the design meets spec. Building on filter theory from the 1940s and 1950s, he developed a systematic method that starts from the spec and derives the circuit directly. He proved the approach and published it in IEEE journals and conference proceedings.
In his free time, Max is learning piano, which he calls the most challenging and most rewarding skill he has taken on as an adult.
Technical Focus
Radio frequency systems. Antenna design, mixers, low-noise and switched-mode power amplifiers, resonators and matching networks, communication systems, full-wave electromagnetic modelling and measurement.
Wireless power transfer. Inductive and capacitive coupling, resonator and matching network synthesis, impedance and load compensation under variable coupling, rectification, kilowatt-scale power stages.
Energy harvesting. Piezoelectric transducers, synchronized switching extraction interfaces, broadband and off-resonance excitation, rectification and power conditioning, power extraction across varying excitation.
Embedded systems. BLE and WiFi connectivity, sensor integration and signal acquisition, embedded DSP, firmware on RTOS, low-power operation, EMI and EMC compliance.