Low power data converters for specific applications

Due to increasing importance of portable equipment and reduction of the supply voltage due to technology scaling, recent efforts in the design of mixed-signal circuits have focused on developing new techniques to reduce the power dissipation and supply voltage. This requires research into new architectures and circuit techniques that enable both integration and programmability. Programmability allows each component to be used for different applications, reducing the total number of components, and increased integration by eliminating external components will reduce cost and power;Since data converters are used in many different applications, in this thesis new low voltage and low power data converter techniques at both the architecture and circuit design levels are investigated to minimize power dissipation and supply voltage. To demonstrate the proposed techniques, test the performance of the proposed architectures, and verify their effectiveness in terms of power savings, five prototype chips are fabricated and tested;First, a re-configurable data converter (RDC) architecture is presented that can be programmed as analog-to-digital converter (ADC), digital-to-analog converter (DAC), or both. The reconfigurability of the RDC to different numbers of ADCs and DACs having different speeds and resolutions makes it an ideal choice for analog test bus, mixed-mode boundary scan, and built-in self test applications. It combines the advantages of both analog test buses and boundary scan techniques while the area overhead of the proposed techniques is very low compared to the mixed-mode boundary scan techniques. RDC can save power by allowing the designer to program it as the right converter for desired application. This architecture can be potentially implemented inside a field programmable gate array (FPGA) to allow the FPGA communicate with the analog world. It can also be used as a stand-alone product to give flexibility to the user to choose ADC/DAC combinations for the desired application;Next, a new method for designing low power and small area ROMless direct digital frequency synthesizers (DDFSs) is presented. In this method, a non-linear digital-to-analog converter is used to replace the phase-to-sine amplitude ROM look-up table and the linear DAC in conventional DDFS. Since the non-linear DAC converts the phase information directly into analog sine wave, no phase-to-amplitude ROM look-up table is required;Finally, a new low voltage technique based on biased inverting opamp that can have almost rail-to-rail swing with continuously valid output is discussed. Based on this biasing technique, a 10-bit segmented R-2R DAC and an 8-bit successive approximation ADC are designed and presented

가변기능형 아날로그 블록 기반의 현장 프로그램이 가능한 혼성 신호 집적회로의 설계

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 공과대학 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2017. 8. 김재하.Fast-emerging electronic device applications demand a variety of new mixed-signal ICs to be developed in fast cycle and with low cost. While field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are established solutions for timely and low-cost prototyping of digital systems, their counterpart for mixed-signal circuits is still an active area for research. This thesis presents a design of a field-programmable IC for analog/mixed-signal circuits, which solves many challenges with the previous works by performing analog functions in time domain. In order to realize the field-programmable analog functionality, time-domain configurable analog block (TCAB) is proposed. A single TCAB can be programmed to various analog circuits, including a time-to-digital converter, digitally-controlled oscillator, digitally-controlled delay cell, digital pulse-width modulator, and phase interpolator. In addition, the TCABs convey and process analog information using the frequency, pulse width, delay, or phase of digital pulses or pulse sequences, rather than using analog voltage or current signals for less susceptibility to attenuation and noise. This analog information expressed in the digital pulses makes it easy to implement scalable programmable interconnects among the TCABs. The architecture of field-programmable IC capable of emulating todays diverse mixed-signal systems is also introduced. In addition to the TCABs, the proposed IC also includes arrays of configurable logic blocks (CLBs) and programmable arithmetic logic units (ALUs) for programmable digital functions. By programming the functionality of the TCAB, CLB, and ALU arrays and configuring the interconnects, the chip can implement various mixed-signal systems. A prototype IC fabricated with 65-nm CMOS technology demonstrates the versatile programmability of the proposed TCAB and the IC by being successfully operated as a 1-GHz phase-locked loop with a 12.3-psrms integrated jitter, as a 50-MS/s analog-to-digital converter with a 32.5-dB SNDR, and as a 1.2-to-0.7V DC–DC converter with 95.5 % efficiency.CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 MOTIVATIONS 1 1.2 THESIS CONTRIBUTION AND ORGANIZATION 5 CHAPTER 2 TIME-DOMAIN CONFIGURABLE ANALOG BLOCK 7 2.1 OVERVIEW OF THE TCAB 9 2.1.1. RECONFIGURABLE FUNCTIONALITY 9 2.1.2. TIME-DOMAIN SIGNAL PROCESSING 14 2.2 CIRCUIT IMPLEMENTATION OF THE TCAB 17 2.3 VERSATILE PROGRAMMABILITY OF TCAB 24 2.3.1. RELAXATION OSCILLATOR 24 2.3.2. DIGITALLY-CONTROLLED OSCILLATOR 28 2.3.3. DIGITAL PULSE-WIDTH MODULATOR 32 2.3.4. GATED OSCILLATOR 34 2.3.5. DIGITALLY-CONTROLLED DELAY CELL 35 2.3.6. PHASE INTERPOLATOR 37 2.3.7. MULTIPHASE DCO 39 2.3.8. NON-OVERLAPPING PULSE GENERATOR 41 2.4 TCAB ARRAY WITH PROGRAMMABLE INTERCONNECTS 43 2.4.1. TCAB ARRAY COMPOSITION 43 2.4.2. PROGRAMMABLE INTERCONNECTS 44 CHAPTER 3 PROPOSED ARCHITECTURE FOR FIELD-PROGRAMMABLE MIXED-SIGNAL IC 49 CHAPTER 4 CIRCUIT IMPLEMENTATION 54 4.1 CONFIGURABLE LOGIC BLOCK ARRAY 55 4.1.1. CONFIGURABLE LOGIC BLOCK 55 4.1.2. CLB ARRAY 56 4.2 ARITHMETIC LOGIC UNIT ARRAY 58 4.2.1. ARITHMETIC LOGIC UNIT 58 4.2.2. ALU ARRAY 61 4.3 INTERFACING BLOCKS 63 4.3.1. VOLTAGE-TO-TIME CONVERTER 64 4.3.2. PHASE-FREQUENCY DETECTOR 65 4.3.3. COUNTER BLOCK 66 4.3.4. TIME-TO-VOLTAGE CONVERTER 68 4.4 PROGRAM METHOD 70 CHAPTER 5 MIXED-SIGNAL EXAMPLES AND EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 73 5.1 MEASUREMENT RESULTS OF TCAB 76 5.1.1. DIGITAL PULSE-WIDTH MODULATOR 76 5.1.2. DIGITALLY-CONTROLLED OSCILLATOR 79 5.1.3. GATED OSCILLATOR 81 5.2 DIGITAL PHASE-LOCKED LOOP 83 5.3 ANALOG-TO-DIGITAL CONVERTER 89 5.4 DCDC CONVERTER 94 CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION 99 BIBLIOGRAPHY 101 초 록 108Docto

High-Performance Fpaa Design For Hierarchical Implementation Of Analog And Mixed-Signal Systems

The design complexity of today's IC has increased dramatically due to the high integration allowed by advanced CMOS VLSI process. A key to manage the increased design complexity while meeting the shortening time-to-market is design automation. In digital world, the field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have evolved to play a very important role by providing ASIC-compatible design methodologies that include design-for-testability, design optimization and rapid prototyping. On the analog side, the drive towards shorter design cycles has demanded the development of high performance analog circuits that are configurable and suitable for CAD methodologies. Field-programmable analog arrays (FPAAs) are intended to achieve the benefits for analog system design as FPGAs have in the digital field. Despite of the obvious advantages of hierarchical analog design, namely short time-to-market and low non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs, this approach has some apparent disadvantages. The redundant devices and routing resources for programmability requires extra chip area, while switch and interconnect parasitics cause considerable performance degradation. To deliver a high-performance FPAA, effective methodologies must be developed to minimize those adversary effects. In this dissertation, three important aspects in the FPAA design are studied to achieve that goal: the programming technology, the configurable analog block (CAB) design and the routing architecture design. Enabled by the Laser MakelinkTM technology, which provides nearly ideal programmable switches, channel segmentation algorithms are developed to improve channel routability and reduce interconnect parasitics. Segmented routing are studied and performance metrics accounting for interconnect parasitics are proposed for performance-driven analog routing. For large scale arrays, buffer insertions are considered to further reduce interconnection delay and cross-coupling noise. A high-performance, highly flexible CAB is developed to realized both continuous-mode and switched-capacitor circuits. In the end, the implementation of an 8-bit, 50MSPS pipelined A/D converter using the proposed FPAA is presented as an example of the hierarchical analog design approach, with its key performance specifications discussed

Palmo : a novel pulsed based signal processing technique for programmable mixed-signal VLSI

In this thesis a new signal processing technique is presented. This technique exploits the use of pulses as the signalling mechanism. This Palmo 1 signalling method applied to signal processing is novel, combining the advantages of both digital and analogue techniques. Pulsed signals are robust, inherently low-power, easily regenerated, and easily distributed across and between chips. The Palmo cells used to perform analogue operations on the pulsed signals are compact, fast, simple and programmable

Low-Power and Programmable Analog Circuitry for Wireless Sensors

Embedding networks of secure, wirelessly-connected sensors and actuators will help us to conscientiously manage our local and extended environments. One major challenge for this vision is to create networks of wireless sensor devices that provide maximal knowledge of their environment while using only the energy that is available within that environment. In this work, it is argued that the energy constraints in wireless sensor design are best addressed by incorporating analog signal processors. The low power-consumption of an analog signal processor allows persistent monitoring of multiple sensors while the device\u27s analog-to-digital converter, microcontroller, and transceiver are all in sleep mode. This dissertation describes the development of analog signal processing integrated circuits for wireless sensor networks. Specific technology problems that are addressed include reconfigurable processing architectures for low-power sensing applications, as well as the development of reprogrammable biasing for analog circuits

Low-Power and Programmable Analog Circuitry for Wireless Sensors

Embedding networks of secure, wirelessly-connected sensors and actuators will help us to conscientiously manage our local and extended environments. One major challenge for this vision is to create networks of wireless sensor devices that provide maximal knowledge of their environment while using only the energy that is available within that environment. In this work, it is argued that the energy constraints in wireless sensor design are best addressed by incorporating analog signal processors. The low power-consumption of an analog signal processor allows persistent monitoring of multiple sensors while the device\u27s analog-to-digital converter, microcontroller, and transceiver are all in sleep mode. This dissertation describes the development of analog signal processing integrated circuits for wireless sensor networks. Specific technology problems that are addressed include reconfigurable processing architectures for low-power sensing applications, as well as the development of reprogrammable biasing for analog circuits

Diseño e implementación de arquitecturas dinámicamente reconfigurables basadas en microprocesador

Tesis doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Escuela Técnica Superior de Informática, Departamento de Ingeniería Informática. Fecha de lectura: 1-06-200