3,252 research outputs found
Design of Power/Analog/Digital Systems Through Mixed-Level Simulations
In recent years the development of the applications in the field of telecommunications, data processing, control, renewable energy generation, consumer and automotive electronics determined the need for increasingly complex systems, also in shorter time to meet the growing market demand. The increasing complexity is mainly due to the mixed nature of these systems that must be developed to accommodate the new functionalities and to satisfy the more stringent performance requirements of the emerging applications. This means a more complex design and verification process. The key to managing the increased design complexity is a structured and integrated design methodology which allows the sharing of different circuit implementations that can be at transistor level and/or at a higher level (i.e.HDL languages).In order to expedite the mixed systems design process it is necessary to provide: an integrated design methodology; a suitable supporting tool able to manage the entire design process and design complexity and its successive verification.It is essential that the different system blocks (power, analog, digital), described at different level of abstraction, can be co-simulated in the same design context. This capability is referred to as mixed-level simulation.One of the objectives of this research is to design a mixed system application referred to the control of a coupled step-up dc-dc converter. This latter consists of a power stage designed at transistor-level, also including accurate power device models, and the analog controller implemented using VerilogA modules. Digital controllers are becoming very attractive in dc-dc converters for their programmability, ability to implement sophisticated control schemes, and ease of integration with other digital systems. Thus, in this dissertation it will be presented a detailed design of a Flash Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC). The designed ADC provides medium-high resolution associated to high-speed performance. This makes it useful not only for the control application aforementioned but also for applications with huge requirements in terms of speed and signal bandwidth. The entire design flow of the overall system has been conducted in the Cadence Design Environment that also provides the ability to mixed-level simulations. Furthermore, the technology process used for the ADC design is the IHP BiCMOS 0.25 µm by using 50 GHz NPN HBT devices
Design of Energy-Efficient A/D Converters with Partial Embedded Equalization for High-Speed Wireline Receiver Applications
As the data rates of wireline communication links increases, channel impairments such as skin effect, dielectric loss, fiber dispersion, reflections and cross-talk become more pronounced. This warrants more interest in analog-to-digital converter (ADC)-based serial link receivers, as they allow for more complex and flexible back-end digital signal processing (DSP) relative to binary or mixed-signal receivers. Utilizing this back-end DSP allows for complex digital equalization and more bandwidth-efficient modulation schemes, while also displaying reduced process/voltage/temperature (PVT) sensitivity. Furthermore, these architectures offer straightforward design translation and can directly leverage the area and power scaling offered by new CMOS technology nodes. However, the power consumption of the ADC front-end and subsequent digital signal processing is a major issue. Embedding partial equalization inside the front-end ADC can potentially result in lowering the complexity of back-end DSP and/or decreasing the ADC resolution requirement, which results in a more energy-effcient receiver. This dissertation presents efficient implementations for multi-GS/s time-interleaved ADCs with partial embedded equalization. First prototype details a 6b 1.6GS/s ADC with a novel embedded redundant-cycle 1-tap DFE structure in 90nm CMOS. The other two prototypes explain more complex 6b 10GS/s ADCs with efficiently embedded feed-forward equalization (FFE) and decision feedback equalization (DFE) in 65nm CMOS. Leveraging a time-interleaved successive approximation ADC architecture, new structures for embedded DFE and FFE are proposed with low power/area overhead. Measurement results over FR4 channels verify the effectiveness of proposed embedded equalization schemes. The comparison of fabricated prototypes against state-of-the-art general-purpose ADCs at similar speed/resolution range shows comparable performances, while the proposed architectures include embedded equalization as well
REALIZATION OF A VARIABLE RESOLUTION MODIFIED SEMIFLASH ADC BASED ON BIT SEGMENTATION SCHEME
A modified variable resolution semiflash ADC, based on ‘bit segmentation scheme’, is presented. Its speed and comparator count are identical to a normal flash ADC. An 8-bit ADC has 256 different bit combinations. Sixteen consecutive bit combinations from the MSB side – beginning with the first one, remain unaltered for such an ADC. It continues this way till the last group of sixteen bits. In the designed circuit, the four MSB and four LSB bits are determined in the first and second part of the clock. Following the same logic, the bits in a 16-bit ADC can be found out in only two clock cycles by employing only fifteen comparators. It implies that a higher resolution ADC can easily be determined with low power and small die area. It is tested in P-SIM Professional 9 for an 8-bit ADC and curves drawn to establish the validity of the proposal
Carbon footprint of 3D-printed bone tissue engineering scaffolds: an life cycle assessment study
The bone tissue engineering scaffolds is one of the
methods for repairing bone defects caused by various factors.
According to modern tissue engineering technology,
three-dimensional (3D) printing technology for bone tissue
engineering provides a temporary basis for the creation of
biological replacements. Through the generated 3D bone tissue
engineering scaffolds from previous studies, the assessment to
evaluate the environmental impact has shown less attention in
research. Therefore, this paper is aimed to propose the Model of
life cycle assessment (LCA) for 3D bone tissue engineering
scaffolds of 3D gel-printing technology and presented the
analysis technique of LCA from cradle-to-gate for assessing the
environmental impacts of carbon footprint. Acrylamide
(C3H5NO), citric acid (C6H8O7), N,N-Dimethylaminopropyl
acrylamide (C8H16N2O), deionized water (H2O), and
2-Hydroxyethyl acrylate (C5H8O3) was selected as the material
resources. Meanwhile, the 3D gel-printing technology was used
as the manufacturing processes in the system boundary. The
analysis is based on the LCA Model through the application of
GaBi software. The environmental impact was assessed in the
3D gel-printing technology and it was obtained that the system
shows the environmental impact of global warming potential
(GWP). All of the emissions contributed to GWP have been
identified such as emissions to air, freshwater, seawater, and
industrial soil. The aggregation of GWP result in the stage of
manufacturing process for input and output data contributed
47.6% and 32.5% respectively. Hence, the data analysis of the
results is expected to use for improving the performance at the
material and manufacturing process of the product life cycle
A Novel Frequency Based Current-to-Digital Converter with Programmable Dynamic Range
This work describes a novel frequency based Current to Digital converter, which would be fully realizable on a single chip.
Biological systems make use of delay line techniques to compute many things critical to the life of an animal. Seeking to build up such a system, we are adapting the auditory localization circuit found in barn owls to detect and compute the magnitude of an input current.
The increasing drive to produce ultra low-power circuits necessitates the use of very small currents. Frequently these currents need to accurately measured, but current solutions typically involve off-chip measurements. These are usually slow, and moving a current off chip increases noise to the system. Moving a system such as this completely on chip will allow for precise measurement and control of bias currents, and it will allow for better compensation of some common transistor mismatch issues.
This project affords an extremely low power (100s nW) converter technology that is also very space efficient. The converter is completely asynchronous which yields ultra-low power standby operation [1]
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TIME-DIFFERENCE CIRCUITS: METHODOLOGY, DESIGN, AND DIGITAL REALIZATION
This thesis presents innovations for a special class of circuits called Time Difference (TD) circuits. We introduce a signal processing methodology with TD signals that alters the target signal from a magnitude perspective to time interval between two time events and systematically organizes the primary TD functions abstracted from existing TD circuits and systems. The TD circuits draw attention from a broad range of application fields. In addition, highly evolved complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology suffers from various problems related to voltage and current amplitude signal processing methods. Compared to traditional analog and digital circuits, TD circuits bring several compelling features: high-resolution, high-throughput, and low-design complexity with digital integration capability. Further, the fabrication technology is advancing into the nanometer regime; the reduction in voltage headroom limits the performance of traditional analog/mixed-signal designs. All-digital design of time-difference circuit needs to be stressed to adapt to the low-cost, low-power, and high-portability applications.
We focus on Time-to-Digital Converters (TDC), one of the crucial building blocks in TD circuits. A novel algorithmic architecture is proposed based on a binary search algorithm and validated with both simulation and fabricated silicon. An all-digital structure Time-difference Amplifier (TDA) is designed and implemented to make FPGA and other all-digital implementations for TDC and related TD circuits feasible. Besides, we propose an all-digital timing measurement circuit based on the process variation from CMOS fabrication: PVTMC, which achieves a high measurement resolution:
Odd/Even order sampling soft-core architecture towards mixed signals Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) Applications
Abstract : Digitization is at the center of fourth industrial revolution (4IR) with previously analog systems being digitized through an analog-to-digital converter. In addition, 4IR applications such as fifth generation (5G) Cellular Networks Technology and Cognitive Electronic Warfare (EW) at some point interface digitally through an analog-to-digital converter. Efficient use of digital resources such as memory, largely depends on the signal sampling design of analog-to-digital converters. Existing even order sampling has been found to perform better than traditional sampling techniques. Research on the efficiency of a digital interface with a 4IR platform is still in its infancy. This paper presents a performance study of three sampling techniques: the proposed new and novel odd/even order sampling architecture, existing Mod-∆, and traditional 1st order delta-sigma, to address this. Step-size signal-to-noise (SNR), dynamic range, and sampling frequency are also studied. It was found that the proposed new and novel odd/even order sampling achieved an SNR performance of 6 dB in comparison to 18 dB for Mod-∆. Sampling frequency findings indicated that the proposed new and novel odd/even order sampling achieved a sampling frequency of 2 kHz in comparison to 8 kHz from a traditional 1st order sigma-delta. Dynamic range findings indicated that the proposed odd/even order sampling has achieved a dynamic range of 1.088 volts/ms in comparison to 1.185 volts/ms from a traditional 1st order sigma-delta. Findings have indicated that the proposed odd/even order sampling has superior SNR and sampling frequency performances, while the dynamic range is reduced by 8%
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