Efficient Continuous-Time Sigma-Delta Converters for High Frequency Applications

Over the years Continuous-Time (CT) Sigma-Delta (ΣΔ) modulators have received a lot of attention due to their ability to efficiently digitize a variety of signals, and suitability for many different applications. Because of their tolerance to component mismatch, the easy to drive input structure, as well as intrinsic anti-aliasing filtering and noise shaping abilities, CTΣΔ modulators have become one of the most popular data-converter type for high dynamic range and moderate/wide bandwidth. This trend is the result of faster CMOS technologies along with design innovations such as better architectures and faster amplifiers. In other words, CTΣΔ modulators are starting to offer the best of both worlds, with high resolution and high bandwidth. This dissertation focuses on the bandwidth and resolution of CTΣΔ modulators. The goal of this research is to use the noise shaping benefits of CTΣΔ modulators for different wireless applications, while achieving high resolution and/or wide bandwidth. For this purpose, this research focuses on two different application areas that demand speed and resolution. These are a low-noise high-resolution time-to-digital converter (TDC), ideal for digital phase lock loops (PLL), and a very high-speed, wide-bandwidth CTΣΔ modulator for wireless communication. The first part of this dissertation presents a new noise shaping time-to-digital converter, based on a CTΣΔ modulator. This is intended to reduce the in-band phase noise of a high frequency digital phase lock loop (PLL) without reducing its loop bandwidth. To prove the effectiveness of the proposed TDC, 30GHz and a 40GHz fractional-N digital PLL are designed as a signal sources for a 240GHz FMCW radar system. Both prototypes are fabricated in a 65nm CMOS process. The standalone TDC achieves 81dB dynamic range and 13.2 equivalent number of bits (ENOB) with 176fs integrated-rms noise from 1MHz bandwidth. The in-band phase noise of the 30GHz digital fractional-N PLL is measured as -87dBc/Hz at a 100kHz offset which is equivalent to -212.6dBc/Hz2 normalized in-band phase noise. The second part of this dissertation focuses on high-speed (GS/s) CTΣΔ modulators for wireless communication, and introduces a new time-interleaved reference data weighted averaging (TI-RDWA) architecture suitable for GS/s CTΣΔ modulators. This new architecture shapes the digital-to-analog converter (DAC) mismatch effects in a CTΣΔ modulator at GS/s operating speeds. It allows us to use smaller DAC unit sizes to reduce area and power consumption for the same bandwidth. The prototype 5GS/s CTΣΔ modulator with TI-RDWA is fabricated in 40nm CMOS and it achieves 156MHz bandwidth, 70dB dynamic range, 84dB SFDR and a Schreier FoM of 158.3dB.PHDElectrical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138763/1/bdayanik_1.pd

Low-Power High-Data-Rate Transmitter Design for Biomedical Application

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Voltage-to-Time Converter for High-Speed Time-Based Analog-to-Digital Converters

In modern complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technologies, the supply voltage scales faster than the threshold voltage (Vth) of the transistors in successive smaller nodes. Moreover, the intrinsic gain of the transistors diminishes as well. Consequently, these issues increase the difficulty of designing higher speed and larger resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) employing voltage-domain ADC architectures. Nevertheless, smaller transistor dimensions in state-of-the-art CMOS technologies leads to reduced capacitance, resulting in lower gate delays. Therefore, it becomes beneficial to first convert an input voltage to a 'time signal' using a voltage-to-time converter (VTC), instead of directly converting it into a digital output. This 'time-signal' could then be converted to a digital output through a time-to-digital converter (TDC) for complete analog-to-digital conversion. However, the overall performance of such an ADC will still be limited to the performance level of the voltage-to-time conversion process. Hence, this thesis presents the design of a linear VTC for a high-speed time-based ADC in 28 nm CMOS process. The proposed VTC consists of a sample-and-hold (S/H) circuit, a ramp generator and a comparator to perform the conversion of the input signal from the voltage to the time domain. Larger linearity is attained by integrating a constant current (with high output impedance) over a capacitor, generating a linear ramp. The VTC operates at 256 MSPS consuming 1.3 mW from 1 V supply with a full-scale 1 V pk-pk differential input signal, while achieving a time-domain output signal with a spurious-free-dynamic-range (SFDR) of 77 dB and a signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio (SNDR) of 56 dB at close to Nyquist frequency (f = 126.5 MHz). The proposed VTC attains an output range of 2.7 ns, which is the highest linear output range for a VTC at this speed, published to date

A Highly Digital VCO-Based ADC With Lookup-Table-Based Background Calibration

CMOS technology scaling has enabled dramatic improvement for digital circuits both in terms of speed and power efficiency. However, most traditional analog-to-digital converter (ADC) architectures are challenged by ever-decreasing supply voltage. The improvement in time resolution enabled by increased digital speeds drives design towards time-domain architectures such as voltage-controlled-oscillator (VCO) based ADCs. The main challenge in VCO-based ADC design is mitigating the nonlinearity of VCO Voltage-to-frequency (V-to-f) characteristics. Achieving signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance better than 40dB requires some form of calibration, which can be realized by analog or digital techniques, or some combination. This dissertation proposes a highly digital, reconfigurable VCO-based ADC with lookup-table (LUT) based background calibration based on split ADC architecture. Each of the two split channels, ADC A and B , contains two VCOs in a differential configuration. This helps alleviate even-order distortions as well as increase the dynamic range. A digital controller on chip can reconfigure the ADCs\u27 sampling rates and resolutions to adapt to various application scenarios. Different types of input signals can be used to train the ADC’s LUT parameters through the simple, anti-aliasing continuous-time input to achieve target resolution. The chip is fabricated in a 180 nm CMOS process, and the active area of analog and digital circuits is 0.09 and 0.16mm^2, respectively. Power consumption of the core ADC function is 25 mW. Measured results for this prototype design with 12-b resolution show ENOB improves from uncorrected 5-b to 11.5-b with calibration time within 200 ms (780K conversions at 5 MSps sample rate)

High Performance Local Oscillator Design for Next Generation Wireless Communication

Local Oscillator (LO) is an essential building block in modern wireless radios. In modern wireless radios, LO often serves as a reference of the carrier signal to modulate or demod- ulate the outgoing or incoming data. The LO signal should be a clean and stable source, such that the frequency or timing information of the carrier reference can be well-defined. However, as radio architecture evolves, the importance of LO path design has become much more important than before. Of late, many radio architecture innovations have exploited sophisticated LO generation schemes to meet the ever-increasing demands of wireless radio performances. The focus of this thesis is to address challenges in the LO path design for next-generation high performance wireless radios. These challenges include (1) Congested spectrum at low radio frequency (RF) below 5GHz (2) Continuing miniaturization of integrated wireless radio, and (3) Fiber-fast (>10Gb/s) mm-wave wireless communication. The thesis begins with a brief introduction of the aforementioned challenges followed by a discussion of the opportunities projected to overcome these challenges. To address the challenge of congested spectrum at frequency below 5GHz, novel ra- dio architectures such as cognitive radio, software-defined radio, and full-duplex radio have drawn significant research interest. Cognitive radio is a radio architecture that opportunisti- cally utilize the unused spectrum in an environment to maximize spectrum usage efficiency. Energy-efficient spectrum sensing is the key to implementing cognitive radio. To enable energy-efficient spectrum sensing, a fast-hopping frequency synthesizer is an essential build- ing block to swiftly sweep the carrier frequency of the radio across the available spectrum. Chapter 2 of this thesis further highlights the challenges and trade-offs of the current LO gen- eration scheme for possible use in sweeping LO-based spectrum analysis. It follows by intro- duction of the proposed fast-hopping LO architecture, its implementation and measurement results of the validated prototype. Chapter 3 proposes an embedded phase-shifting LO-path design for wideband RF self-interference cancellation for full-duplex radio. It demonstrates a synergistic design between the LO path and signal to perform self-interference cancellation. To address the challenge of continuing miniaturization of integrated wireless radio, ring oscillator-based frequency synthesizer is an attractive candidate due to its compactness. Chapter 4 discussed the difficulty associated with implementing a Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) with ultra-small form-factor. It further proposes the concept sub-sampling PLL with time- based loop filter to address these challenges. A 65nm CMOS prototype and its measurement result are presented for validation of the concept. In shifting from RF to mm-wave frequencies, the performance of wireless communication links is boosted by significant bandwidth and data-rate expansion. However, the demand for data-rate improvement is out-pacing the innovation of radio architectures. A >10Gb/s mm-wave wireless communication at 60GHz is required by emerging applications such as virtual-reality (VR) headsets, inter-rack data transmission at data center, and Ultra-High- Definition (UHD) TV home entertainment systems. Channel-bonding is considered to be a promising technique for achieving >10Gb/s wireless communication at 60GHz. Chapter 5 discusses the fundamental radio implementation challenges associated with channel-bonding for 60GHz wireless communication and the pros and cons of prior arts that attempted to address these challenges. It is followed by a discussion of the proposed 60GHz channel- bonding receiver, which utilizes only a single PLL and enables both contiguous and non- contiguous channel-bonding schemes. Finally, Chapter 6 presents the conclusion of this thesis

Millimeter-wave Communication and Radar Sensing — Opportunities, Challenges, and Solutions

With the development of communication and radar sensing technology, people are able to seek for a more convenient life and better experiences. The fifth generation (5G) mobile network provides high speed communication and internet services with a data rate up to several gigabit per second (Gbps). In addition, 5G offers great opportunities of emerging applications, for example, manufacture automation with the help of precise wireless sensing. For future communication and sensing systems, increasing capacity and accuracy is desired, which can be realized at millimeter-wave spectrum from 30 GHz to 300 GHz with several tens of GHz available bandwidth. Wavelength reduces at higher frequency, this implies more compact transceivers and antennas, and high sensing accuracy and imaging resolution. Challenges arise with these application opportunities when it comes to realizing prototype or demonstrators in practice. This thesis proposes some of the solutions addressing such challenges in a laboratory environment.High data rate millimeter-wave transmission experiments have been demonstrated with the help of advanced instrumentations. These demonstrations show the potential of transceiver chipsets. On the other hand, the real-time communication demonstrations are limited to either low modulation order signals or low symbol rate transmissions. The reason for that is the lack of commercially available high-speed analog-to-digital converters (ADCs); therefore, conventional digital synchronization methods are difficult to implement in real-time systems at very high data rates. In this thesis, two synchronous baseband receivers are proposed with carrier recovery subsystems which only require low-speed ADCs [A][B].Besides synchronization, high-frequency signal generation is also a challenge in millimeter-wave communications. The frequency divider is a critical component of a millimeter-wave frequency synthesizer. Having both wide locking range and high working frequencies is a challenge. In this thesis, a tunable delay gated ring oscillator topology is proposed for dual-mode operation and bandwidth extension [C]. Millimeter-wave radar offers advantages for high accuracy sensing. Traditional millimeter-wave radar with frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW), or continuous-wave (CW), all have their disadvantages. Typically, the FMCW radar cannot share the spectrum with other FMCW radars.\ua0 With limited bandwidth, the number of FMCW radars that could coexist in the same area is limited. CW radars have a limited ambiguous distance of a wavelength. In this thesis, a phase-modulated radar with micrometer accuracy is presented [D]. It is applicable in a multi-radar scenario without occupying more bandwidth, and its ambiguous distance is also much larger than the CW radar. Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) radar has similar properties. However, its traditional fast calculation method, fast Fourier transform (FFT), limits its measurement accuracy. In this thesis, an accuracy enhancement technique is introduced to increase the measurement accuracy up to the micrometer level [E]

Design of Analog-to-Digital Converters with Embedded Mixing for Ultra-Low-Power Radio Receivers

In the field of radio receivers, down-conversion methods usually rely on one (or more) explicit mixing stage(s) before the analog-to-digital converter (ADC). These stages not only contribute to the overall power consumption but also have an impact on area and can compromise the receiver’s performance in terms of noise and linearity. On the other hand, most ADCs require some sort of reference signal in order to properly digitize an analog input signal. The implementation of this reference signal usually relies on bandgap circuits and reference buffers to generate a constant, stable, dc signal. Disregarding this conventional approach, the work developed in this thesis aims to explore the viability behind the usage of a variable reference signal. Moreover, it demonstrates that not only can an input signal be properly digitized, but also shifted up and down in frequency, effectively embedding the mixing operation in an ADC. As a result, ADCs in receiver chains can perform double-duty as both a quantizer and a mixing stage. The lesser known charge-sharing (CS) topology, within the successive approximation register (SAR) ADCs, is used for a practical implementation, due to its feature of “pre-charging” the reference signal prior to the conversion. Simulation results from an 8-bit CS-SAR ADC designed in a 0.13 μm CMOS technology validate the proposed technique

Ring Amplifiers for Switched Capacitor Circuits

In this paper the fundamental concept of ring amplification is introduced and explored. Ring amplifiers enable efficient amplification in scaled environments, and possess the benefits of efficient slew-based charging, rapid stabilization, compression-immunity (inherent rail-to-rail output swing), and performance that scales with process technology. A basic operational theory is established, and the core benefits of this technique are identified. Measured results from two separate ring amplifier based pipelined ADCs are presented. The first prototype IC, a simple 10.5-bit, 61.5dB SNDR pipelined ADC which uses only ring amplifiers, is used to demonstrate the core benefits. The second fabricated IC presented is a high-resolution pipelined ADC which employs the technique of Split-CLS to perform efficient, accurate amplification aided by ring amplifiers. The 15-bit ADC is implemented in a 0.18 μm CMOS technology and achieves 76.8 dB SNDR and 95.4 dB SFDR at 20 Msps while consuming 5.1 mW, achieving a FoM of 45 fJ/conversion-step.Keywords: correlated level shifting, analog to digital conversion, analog to digital converter, slew-based, RAMP, rail-to-rail, ring amplification, ADC, CLS, ringamp, A/D, low power, ring amp, scaling, Split-CLS, ring amplifier, high resolution, switched-capacitor, scalability, stabilized ring oscillator, nanoscale CMOSThis is the author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by IEEE-Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and can be found at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=4. ©2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works

Concepts for Short Range Millimeter-wave Miniaturized Radar Systems with Built-in Self-Test

This work explores short-range millimeter wave radar systems, with emphasis on miniaturization and overall system cost reduction. The designing and implementation processes, starting from the system level design considerations and characterization of the individual components to final implementation of the proposed architecture are described briefly. Several D-band radar systems are developed and their functionality and performances are demonstrated