Ultra Low Power Digital Circuit Design for Wireless Sensor Network Applications

Ny forskning innenfor feltet trådløse sensornettverk åpner for nye og innovative produkter og løsninger. Biomedisinske anvendelser er blant områdene med størst potensial og det investeres i dag betydelige beløp for å bruke denne teknologien for å gjøre medisinsk diagnostikk mer effektiv samtidig som man åpner for fjerndiagnostikk basert på trådløse sensornoder integrert i et ”helsenett”. Målet er å forbedre tjenestekvalitet og redusere kostnader samtidig som brukerne skal oppleve forbedret livskvalitet som følge av økt trygghet og mulighet for å tilbringe mest mulig tid i eget hjem og unngå unødvendige sykehusbesøk og innleggelser. For å gjøre dette til en realitet er man avhengige av sensorelektronikk som bruker minst mulig energi slik at man oppnår tilstrekkelig batterilevetid selv med veldig små batterier. I sin avhandling ” Ultra Low power Digital Circuit Design for Wireless Sensor Network Applications” har PhD-kandidat Farshad Moradi fokusert på nye løsninger innenfor konstruksjon av energigjerrig digital kretselektronikk. Avhandlingen presenterer nye løsninger både innenfor aritmetiske og kombinatoriske kretser, samtidig som den studerer nye statiske minneelementer (SRAM) og alternative minnearkitekturer. Den ser også på utfordringene som oppstår når silisiumteknologien nedskaleres i takt med mikroprosessorutviklingen og foreslår løsninger som bidrar til å gjøre kretsløsninger mer robuste og skalerbare i forhold til denne utviklingen. De viktigste konklusjonene av arbeidet er at man ved å introdusere nye konstruksjonsteknikker både er i stand til å redusere energiforbruket samtidig som robusthet og teknologiskalerbarhet øker. Forskningen har vært utført i samarbeid med Purdue University og vært finansiert av Norges Forskningsråd gjennom FRINATprosjektet ”Micropower Sensor Interface in Nanometer CMOS Technology”

IMPROVED SPEED LOW POWER AND LOW VOLTAGE SRAM DESIGN FOR LDPC APPLICATION CIRCUITS

The design of SRAM has evolved to suffice the need of the industry in terms of speed, power dissipation and other parameters. This paper proposed a SRAM design and an attempt has been made to design circuits using dynamic logic and pass transistor logic to obtain better performance in terms of speed, power dissipation and throughput. The dynamic logic would maintain voltage degradation by using the PMOS and NMOS transistor just as the CMOS logic, even though the design cell uses majority NMOS transistors. The proposed circuits are simulated using BSIM for different CMOS feature sizes of 70 nm, 90 nm, 120 nm and 180 nm. The results obtained have been analysed and shows that the proposed circuit of 8T performs much better as compared to other circuit configurations. There is significant improvement in power dissipation by 99.64 %, delay by 99.9 %, throughput of 490 Mbps and power delay product of 99.96 %

Robust Design of Variation-Sensitive Digital Circuits

The nano-age has already begun, where typical feature dimensions are smaller than 100nm. The operating frequency is expected to increase up to 12 GHz, and a single chip will contain over 12 billion transistors in 2020, as given by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) initiative. ITRS also predicts that the scaling of CMOS devices and process technology, as it is known today, will become much more difficult as the industry advances towards the 16nm technology node and further. This aggressive scaling of CMOS technology has pushed the devices to their physical limits. Design goals are governed by several factors other than power, performance and area such as process variations, radiation induced soft errors, and aging degradation mechanisms. These new design challenges have a strong impact on the parametric yield of nanometer digital circuits and also result in functional yield losses in variation-sensitive digital circuits such as Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) and flip-flops. Moreover, sub-threshold SRAM and flip-flops circuits, which are aggravated by the strong demand for lower power consumption, show larger sensitivity to these challenges which reduces their robustness and yield. Accordingly, it is not surprising that the ITRS considers variability and reliability as the most challenging obstacles for nanometer digital circuits robust design. Soft errors are considered one of the main reliability and robustness concerns in SRAM arrays in sub-100nm technologies due to low operating voltage, small node capacitance, and high packing density. The SRAM arrays soft errors immunity is also affected by process variations. We develop statistical design-oriented soft errors immunity variations models for super-threshold and sub-threshold SRAM cells accounting for die-to-die variations and within-die variations. This work provides new design insights and highlights the important design knobs that can be used to reduce the SRAM cells soft errors immunity variations. The developed models are scalable, bias dependent, and only require the knowledge of easily measurable parameters. This makes them useful in early design exploration, circuit optimization as well as technology prediction. The derived models are verified using Monte Carlo SPICE simulations, referring to an industrial hardware-calibrated 65nm CMOS technology. The demand for higher performance leads to very deep pipelining which means that hundreds of thousands of flip-flops are required to control the data flow under strict timing constraints. A violation of the timing constraints at a flip-flop can result in latching incorrect data causing the overall system to malfunction. In addition, the flip-flops power dissipation represents a considerable fraction of the total power dissipation. Sub-threshold flip-flops are considered the most energy efficient solution for low power applications in which, performance is of secondary importance. Accordingly, statistical gate sizing is conducted to different flip-flops topologies for timing yield improvement of super-threshold flip-flops and power yield improvement of sub-threshold flip-flops. Following that, a comparative analysis between these flip-flops topologies considering the required overhead for yield improvement is performed. This comparative analysis provides useful recommendations that help flip-flops designers on selecting the best flip-flops topology that satisfies their system specifications while taking the process variations impact and robustness requirements into account. Adaptive Body Bias (ABB) allows the tuning of the transistor threshold voltage, Vt, by controlling the transistor body voltage. A forward body bias reduces Vt, increasing the device speed at the expense of increased leakage power. Alternatively, a reverse body bias increases Vt, reducing the leakage power but slowing the device. Therefore, the impact of process variations is mitigated by speeding up slow and less leaky devices or slowing down devices that are fast and highly leaky. Practically, the implementation of the ABB is desirable to bias each device in a design independently, to mitigate within-die variations. However, supplying so many separate voltages inside a die results in a large area overhead. On the other hand, using the same body bias for all devices on the same die limits its capability to compensate for within-die variations. Thus, the granularity level of the ABB scheme is a trade-off between the within-die variations compensation capability and the associated area overhead. This work introduces new ABB circuits that exhibit lower area overhead by a factor of 143X than that of previous ABB circuits. In addition, these ABB circuits are resolution free since no digital-to-analog converters or analog-to-digital converters are required on their implementations. These ABB circuits are adopted to high performance critical paths, emulating a real microprocessor architecture, for process variations compensation and also adopted to SRAM arrays, for Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) aging and process variations compensation. The effectiveness of the new ABB circuits is verified by post layout simulation results and test chip measurements using triple-well 65nm CMOS technology. The highly capacitive nodes of wide fan-in dynamic circuits and SRAM bitlines limit the performance of these circuits. In addition, process variations mitigation by statistical gate sizing increases this capacitance further and fails in achieving the target yield improvement. We propose new negative capacitance circuits that reduce the overall parasitic capacitance of these highly capacitive nodes. These negative capacitance circuits are adopted to wide fan-in dynamic circuits for timing yield improvement up to 99.87% and to SRAM arrays for read access yield improvement up to 100%. The area and power overheads of these new negative capacitance circuits are amortized over the large die area of the microprocessor and the SRAM array. The effectiveness of the new negative capacitance circuits is verified by post layout simulation results and test chip measurements using 65nm CMOS technology

Deep-submicron embedded processor architectures for high-performance, low-cost and low-power

Because the market has an insatiable appetite for new functionality, performance is becoming an increasingly important factor. The telecommunication and network domains are especially touched by this phenomenon but they are not the only ones. For instance, the automotive applications are also affected by the passion around the electronic devices that are programmable. This thesis work will focus on embedded applications based on programmable processing unit. Indeed, nowadays, for time to market reasons, re-use and flexibility are important parameters. Consequently, embedded processors seem to be the solution because the behavior of the circuit can be modified by software what does not cost a lot compared to Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) or Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) where hardware modifications are necessary. This choice is judicious compared to multi-pipeline processors like superscalar or Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) architectures or even in comparison to a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) which require more silicon area, consume more energy and are not as robust as simple scalar processors. Nevertheless, commercial scalar processors, dedicated to embedded systems, have poor frequencies which has a negative effect on their performance. This phenomenon is even more visible with deep-submicron technologies where the primary memories and wire delays do not scale as fast as the logic. Furthermore, the memory speed decreases when their capacity of storage increases and depends on both their organization (associativity, word size, etc.) and the IPs of the foundry. Likewise, synthesizable IP memories have a greater access time than their hard macrocell counterparts. This thesis work proposes a new synthesizable architecture for scalar embedded processors dedicated to alleviate the drawbacks previously mentioned and called Memory Wall : so, its goal is to push back the limits of frequency without introducing wasted cycles used to solve data and control dependencies, independently of the foundry. The architecture that came out, called Deep Submicron RISC (DSR), is made up of a single pipeline with eight stages that executes the instructions in order. In addition to tackle the memory access time and to alleviate the delays of wires, it is appropriate to minimize the power consumption. The proposed architecture is compared to two MIPS architectures, the MIPS R3000 and the MIPS32 24k in order to be able to analyze the performance of the architectures themselves, independently of both Instruction Set (ISA) MIPS 1 and compiler. The R3000 is a processor born in the 90's and the 24k came out in 2004. Obviously, the study reveals that the five-stage processor remains efficient – especially in comparison to the MIPS24k – when the critical path passes by the core and not by the primary memories. Even if the MIPS24k tackles in part the Memory Wall, DSR is much more efficient and reach a gain of efficiency – defined as performance/surface – of 72% thanks to its High-density version (DSR-HD) compared to a five-stage processor. DSR is even more efficient than the two MIPS processors when the transistor channel length decreases, the wire delays are important or the memories are large and their organization complex

Caractérisation électrique et modélisation des transistors FDSOI sub-22nm

Silicon on insulator (SOI) transistors are among the best candidates for sub-22nm technology nodes. At this scale, the devices integrate extremely thin buried oxide layers (BOX) and body. They also integrate advanced high-k dielectric / metal gate stacks and strain engineering is used to improve transport properties with, for instance, the use of SiGe alloys in the channel of p-type MOS transistors. The optimization of such a technology requires precise and non-destructive experimental techniques able to provide information about the quality of electron transport and interface quality, as well as about the real values of physical parameters (dimensions and doping level) at the end of the process. Techniques for parameter extraction from electrical characteristics have been developed over time. The aim of this thesis work is to reconsider these methods and to further develop them to account for the extremely small dimensions used for sub-22nm SOI generations. The work is based on extended characterization and modelling in support. Among the original results obtained during this thesis, special notice should be put on the adaptation of the complete split CV method which is now able to extract the characteristic parameters for the entire stack, from the substrate and its doping level to the gate stack, as well as an extremely detailed analysis of electron transport based on low temperature characterization in back-gate electrostatic coupling conditions or the exploitation of channel magnetoresistance from the linear regime of operation to saturation. Finally, a detailed analysis of low-frequency noise closes this study.Parmi les architectures candidates pour les générations sub-22nm figurent les transistors sur silicium sur isolant (SOI). A cette échelle, les composants doivent intégrer des films isolants enterrés (BOX) et des canaux de conduction (Body) ultra-minces. A ceci s'ajoute l'utilisation d'empilements de grille avancés (diélectriques à haute permittivité / métal de grille) et une ingénierie de la contrainte mécanique avec l'utilisation d'alliages SiGe pour le canal des transistors de type P. La mise au point d'une telle technologie demande qu'on soit capable d'extraire de façon non destructive et avec précision la qualité du transport électronique et des interfaces, ainsi que les valeurs des paramètres physiques (dimensions et dopages), qui sont obtenues effectivement en fin de fabrication. Des techniques d'extraction de paramètres ont été développées au cours du temps. L'objectif de cette thèse est de reconsidérer et de faire évoluer ces techniques pour les adapter aux épaisseurs extrêmement réduites des composants étudiés. Elle combine mesures approfondies et modélisation en support. Parmi les résultats originaux obtenus au cours de cette thèse, citons notamment l'adaptation de la méthode split CV complète qui permet désormais d'extraire les paramètres caractérisant l'ensemble de l'empilement SOI, depuis le substrat et son dopage jusqu'à la grille, ainsi qu'une analyse extrêmement détaillée du transport grâce à des mesures en régime de couplage grille arrière à température variable ou l'exploitation de la magnétorésistance de canal depuis le régime linéaire jusqu'en saturation. Le mémoire se termine par une analyse détaillée du bruit basse fréquence

CMOS SPAD-based image sensor for single photon counting and time of flight imaging

The facility to capture the arrival of a single photon, is the fundamental limit to the detection of quantised electromagnetic radiation. An image sensor capable of capturing a picture with this ultimate optical and temporal precision is the pinnacle of photo-sensing. The creation of high spatial resolution, single photon sensitive, and time-resolved image sensors in complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology offers numerous benefits in a wide field of applications. These CMOS devices will be suitable to replace high sensitivity charge-coupled device (CCD) technology (electron-multiplied or electron bombarded) with significantly lower cost and comparable performance in low light or high speed scenarios. For example, with temporal resolution in the order of nano and picoseconds, detailed three-dimensional (3D) pictures can be formed by measuring the time of flight (TOF) of a light pulse. High frame rate imaging of single photons can yield new capabilities in super-resolution microscopy. Also, the imaging of quantum effects such as the entanglement of photons may be realised. The goal of this research project is the development of such an image sensor by exploiting single photon avalanche diodes (SPAD) in advanced imaging-specific 130nm front side illuminated (FSI) CMOS technology. SPADs have three key combined advantages over other imaging technologies: single photon sensitivity, picosecond temporal resolution and the facility to be integrated in standard CMOS technology. Analogue techniques are employed to create an efficient and compact imager that is scalable to mega-pixel arrays. A SPAD-based image sensor is described with 320 by 240 pixels at a pitch of 8μm and an optical efficiency or fill-factor of 26.8%. Each pixel comprises a SPAD with a hybrid analogue counting and memory circuit that makes novel use of a low-power charge transfer amplifier. Global shutter single photon counting images are captured. These exhibit photon shot noise limited statistics with unprecedented low input-referred noise at an equivalent of 0.06 electrons. The CMOS image sensor (CIS) trends of shrinking pixels, increasing array sizes, decreasing read noise, fast readout and oversampled image formation are projected towards the formation of binary single photon imagers or quanta image sensors (QIS). In a binary digital image capture mode, the image sensor offers a look-ahead to the properties and performance of future QISs with 20,000 binary frames per second readout with a bit error rate of 1.7 x 10-3. The bit density, or cumulative binary intensity, against exposure performance of this image sensor is in the shape of the famous Hurter and Driffield densitometry curves of photographic film. Oversampled time-gated binary image capture is demonstrated, capturing 3D TOF images with 3.8cm precision in a 60cm range