He worked as an electrical engineer with Bell Labs and in January 1985 joined UCLA as a tenured academic.

In 2007, he left for a three-year sabbatical to work as a founding dean of the engineering school at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and returned to Los Angeles in 2009.

In 2015, UC, Berkeley recognised him as a distinguished alumnus for his contributions to the theory and practice of analog and RF circuits.

Abidi is an IEEE Fellow and a member of the United States National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

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.

[12] 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.

[11] In the late 1990s, the RF CMOS technology that he pioneered was widely adopted in wireless networking, as mobile phones began entering widespread use.