Since 1985, Abidi has worked at
UCLA, where he is currently a Distinguished Chancellor's Professor. While working at Bell in the early 1980s, he worked on the development of
sub-micron MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor)
VLSI (very
large-scale integration) technology at the Advanced LSI Development Lab, along with Marty Lepselter,
George E. Smith and Harry Bol. As one of the few
circuit designers at the lab, Abidi demonstrated the potential of sub-micron
NMOS integrated circuit technology in high-speed
communication circuits, and developed the first
MOS amplifiers for
Gb/s data rates in
optical fiber receivers. Abidi's work was initially met with skepticism from proponents of
GaAs and
bipolar junction transistors, the dominant technologies for high-speed circuits at the time. In 1985 he joined
UCLA, where he pioneered
RF CMOS technology during the late 1980s to early 1990s. His work changed the way in which
RF circuits would be designed, away from discrete
bipolar transistors and towards
CMOS integrated circuits. He was a visiting researcher at
HP Labs for a year in 1989, during which time he investigated
A/D conversion at ultra-high speeds, before returning to UCLA and researching analog
signal chains for
disk drive read channels, high-speed A/D conversion, and analog
CMOS circuits for
signal processing and
communications. In 1995, Abidi used CMOS switched-capacitor technology to demonstrate the first direct-conversion
transceivers for
digital communications. ==Awards and recognitions==