Heydari is a professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. His research in the design of terahertz and millimeter-wave integrated circuits in silicon resulted in the world's first CMOS fundamental frequency transceiver operating at 210 GHz and the first terahertz closed-loop synthesizer source operating at 300 GHz in silicon. He introduced the first dual-band radar-on-chip with applications in automotive sensing and safety. His contribution in millimeter-wave imaging led to the invention of new concept called "super pixels" in the context of imaging array receivers. Heydari and his team discovered new transceiver architectures that obviate the need for high resolution data converters. This discovery led to the first "beyond-5G" integrated transceiver chipsets in silicon. Heydari is a Fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for contributions to silicon-based millimeter-wave integrated circuits and systems. He is an IEEE Distinguished Microwave Lecturer, and was formerly a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society from 2014 till 2016. He received the 2005 National Science Foundation CAREER Awards. Heydari is the recipient of both the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Darlington and Guillemin-Cauer Awards. Heydari gave a keynote speech to the 2013 IEEE GlobalSIP Symposium and a Distinguished Speech to 2014 IEEE Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems. He serves on the Technical Program Committee of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference. Heydari and his research team have published more than 150 international conference and journal articles. They won both the first place and the best concept paper in the 2009 Business Plan Competition at The Paul Merage School of Business. He is the lead principal investigator of the largest National Science Foundation Award ever received by a faculty member affiliated with the University of California, Irvine's Henry Samueli School of Engineering. In February 2018, in its annual meeting, attended by more than 700 business executives, academic leaders and elected officials, the Orange County Business Council recognized Heydari as a "Game Changer, who is transforming the world by his scholarly work."
