From 1993 to 1995, he worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill where he was the lead chip architect for AT&T's 51.84 Mb/s transceiver chips over twisted-pair wiring for Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)-LAN and very high-speed digital subscriber line (VDSL) chip-sets. Since August 1995, he is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Coordinated Science Laboratory where he is presently a Professor. His research interests are in the design of integrated circuits and systems for broadband communications including low-power/high-performance VLSI architectures for error-control coding, equalization, as well as digital integrated circuit design. He has published more than 90 journal articles/book chapters/conference publications in this area and holds five US patents. He is also a co-author of the research monograph Pipelined Adaptive Digital Filters published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1994.

Dr. Shanbhag became an IEEE Fellow in 2006, received the 2006 IEEE Journal of Solid-State Best Paper Award, the 2001 IEEE Transactions on VLSI Best Paper Award, the 1999 IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Best Paper Award, the 1999 Xerox Faculty Award, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1996, and the 1994 Darlington Best Paper Award from the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. From 1997-1999, he was a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. From 1997-99 and from 1999-2002, he served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transaction on Circuits and Systems: Part II and the IEEE Transactions on VLSI, respectively. He is serving on the technical program committees of various international conferences such as ISSCC, ICCAD, ISLPED and SIPS.

In 2000, Dr. Shanbhag co-founded and served as the chief technology officer of Intersymbol Communications, Inc., a venture-funded fabless semiconductor start-up that provides mixed-signal ICs for electronic dispersion compensation of optical links. In 2007, Intersymbol Communications, Inc., was acquired by Finisar Corporation, Inc., where Dr. Shanbhag is presently serving as a Senior Scientist on a part-time basis.