Maarten Ditzel was born in Hattem, the Netherlands, on September 15, 1975. For his secondary education he attended the Gymnasium Celeanum in Zwolle and the Johan van Oldenbarnevelt Gymnasium in Amersfoort, where he obtained his diploma in 1993. The same year he started studying Electrical Engineering at Delft University of Technology. In 1998 he obtained the M.Sc. degree with honors in the field of micro-electronics. His thesis project dealt with the design and implementation of a processor core for a hybrid spread-spectrum transceiver and was carried out in the Circuits and Systems (CAS) group led by Prof. Ralph Otten. In 1998 Maarten started his research towards a Ph.D. degree at Delft… University of Technology in the DIOC (Delft Center for Interfaculty Research) program Ubiquitous Communications, which resulted in this dissertation. During his Ph.D. he spent a month at IMEC (Interuniversity MicroElectronics Center), Leuven, Belgium. In addition, he worked for three months as a visiting scientist at Lucent Technologies, Bell-Labs Innovations, Murray-Hill, NJ, USA. Also during his Ph.D. research, he co-founded the student association MEST (Micro-Electronics and Silicon Technology). In October 2003 he was appointed to his current position as a researcher at the Physics and Electronics Laboratory of the Dutch Organization for Applied Scientific Research.