Transceiver architectures and sub-mW fast frequency-hopping synthesizers for ultra-low power WSNs

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have the potential to become the third wireless revolution after wireless voice networks in the 80s and wireless data networks in the late 90s. This revolution will finally connect together the physical world of the human and the virtual world of the electronic devices. Though in the recent years large progress in power consumption reduction has been made in the wireless arena in order to increase the battery life, this is still not enough to achieve a wide adoption of this technology. Indeed, while nowadays consumers are used to charge batteries in laptops, mobile phones and other high-tech products, this operation becomes infeasible when scaled up to large industrial, enterprise or home networks composed of thousands of wireless nodes. Wireless sensor networks come as a new way to connect electronic equipments reducing, in this way, the costs associated with the installation and maintenance of large wired networks. To accomplish this task, it is necessary to reduce the energy consumption of the wireless node to a point where energy harvesting becomes feasible and the node energy autonomy exceeds the life time of the wireless node itself. This thesis focuses on the radio design, which is the backbone of any wireless node. A common approach to radio design for WSNs is to start from a very simple radio (like an RFID) adding more functionalities up to the point in which the power budget is reached. In this way, the robustness of the wireless link is traded off for power reducing the range of applications that can draw benefit form a WSN. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach to the radio design for WSNs. We started from a proven architecture like Bluetooth, and progressively we removed all the functionalities that are not required for WSNs. The robustness of the wireless link is guaranteed by using a fast frequency hopping spread spectrum technique while the power budget is achieved by optimizing the radio architecture and the frequency hopping synthesizer Two different radio architectures and a novel fast frequency hopping synthesizer are proposed that cover the large space of applications for WSNs. The two architectures make use of the peculiarities of each scenario and, together with a novel fast frequency hopping synthesizer, proved that spread spectrum techniques can be used also in severely power constrained scenarios like WSNs. This solution opens a new window toward a radio design, which ultimately trades off flexibility, rather than robustness, for power consumption. In this way, we broadened the range of applications for WSNs to areas in which security and reliability of the communication link are mandatory

Contributions to adaptive equalization and timing recovery for optical storage systems

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적응형 눈 감지 방법을 포함한 저전력 메모리 컨트롤러의 설계

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 공과대학 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2017. 8. 김수환.and the read margin was enhanced from 0.30UI and 76mV without AF-CTLE to 0.47UI and 80mV to with AF-CTLE. The power efficiency during burst write and read were 5.68pJ/bit and 1.83pJ/bit respectively.A 4266Mb/s/pin LPDDR4 memory controller with an asynchronous feedback continuous-time linear equalizer and an adaptive 3-step eye detection algorithm is presented. The asynchronous feedback continuous-time linear equalizer removes the glitch of DQS without training by applying an offset larger than the noise, and improves read margin by operating as a decision feedback equalizer in DQ path. The adaptive 3-step eye detection algorithm reduces power consumption and black-out time in initialization sequence and retraining in comparison to the 2-dimensional full scanning. In addition, the adaptive 3-step eye detection algorithm can maintain the accuracy by sequentially searching the eye boundaries and initializing the resolution using the binary search method when the eye detection result changes. To achieve high bandwidth, a transmitter and receiver suitable for training are proposed. The transmitter consists of a phase interpolator, a digitally-controlled delay line, a 16:1 serializer, a pre-driver and low-voltage swing terminated logic. The receiver consists of a reference voltage generator, a continuous-time linear equalizer, a phase interpolator, a digitally-controlled delay line, a 1:4 deserializer, and a 4:16 deserializer. The clocking architecture is also designed for low power consumption in idle periods, which are commonly lengthy in mobile applications. A prototype chip was implemented in a 65nm CMOS process with ball grid array package and tested with commodity LPDDR4. The write margin was 0.36UI and 148mVCHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 MOTIVATION 1 1.2 THESIS ORGANIZATION 5 CHAPTER 2 LPDDR4 6 2.1 COMPARISON BETWEEN LPDDR3 AND LPDDR4 6 2.2 SOURCE SYNCHRONOUS CLOCKING SCHEME 9 2.3 SIGNALING STANDARDS 11 2.4 MULTIPLE TRAININGS 14 2.5 RE-TRAINING AND RE-INITIALIZATION 16 CHAPTER 3 ADAPTIVE EYE DETECTION 18 3.1 EYE DETECTION 18 3.2 1X2Y3X EYE DETECTION 20 3.3 ADAPTIVE GAIN CONTROL 22 3.4 ADAPTIVE 1X2Y3X EYE DETECTION 24 CHAPTER 4 LPDDR4 MEMORY CONTROLLER 26 4.1 DESIGN PROCEDURE 26 4.2 ARCHITECTURE 30 4.2.1 TRANSMITTER 33 4.2.2 RECEIVER 35 4.2.3 CLOCKING ARCHITECTURE 38 4.3 CIRCUIT IMPLEMENTATION 43 4.3.1 ADPLL WITH MULTI-MODULUS DIVIDER 43 4.3.2 ADDLL WITH TRIANGULAR-MODULATED PI 45 4.3.3 CTLE WITH AUTO-DQS CLEANING 47 4.3.4 DES WITH CLOCK DOMAIN CROSSING 52 4.3.5 LVSTL WITH ZQ CALIBRATION 54 4.3.6 COARSE-FINE DCDL 56 4.4 LINK TRAINING 57 4.4.1 SIMULATION RESULTS 59 CHAPTER 5 MEASUREMENT RESULTS 72 5.1 MEASUREMENT SETUP 72 5.2 MEASUREMENT RESULTS OF SUB-BLOCK 80 5.2.1 ADPLL WITH MULTI-MODULUS DIVIDER 80 5.2.2 ADDLL WITH TRIANGULAR-MODULATED PI 82 5.2.3 COARSE-FINE DCDL 84 5.3 LPDDR4 INTERFACE MEASUREMENT RESULTS 84 CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION 88 BIBLIOGRAPHY 90Docto

Time-Based Analog to Digital Converters.

Low-power, small analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) have numerous applications in areas ranging from power-aware wireless sensing nodes for environmental monitoring to biomedical monitoring devices in point-of-care (PoC) instruments. The work focuses on ultra-low-power, and highly integrated implementations of ADCs, in nanometer-scale complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) very large scale (VLSI) integrated circuit fabrication technologies. In particular, we explore time-based techniques for data conversion, which can potentially achieve significant reductions in power consumption while keeping silicon chip area small, compared to today’s state-of-the-art ADC architectures. Today, digital integrated circuits and digital signal processors (DSP) are taking advantage of technology scaling to achieve improvements power, speed, and cost. Meanwhile, as technology scaling reduces supply voltage and intrinsic transistor gain, analog circuit designers face disadvantages. With these disadvantages of technology scaling, two new broad trends have emerged in ADC research. The first trend is the emergence of digitally-assisted analog design, which emphasizes the relaxation of analog domain precision and the recovering accuracy (and performance) in the digital domain. This approach is a good match to the capabilities of fine line technology and helps to reduce power consumption. The second trend is the representation of signals, and the processing of signals, in the time domain. Technology scaling and its focus on high-performance digital systems offers better time resolution by reducing the gate delay. Therefore, if we represent a signal as a period of time, rather than as a voltage, we can take advantage of technology scaling, and potentially reduce power consumption and die area. This thesis focuses on pulse position modulation (PPM) ADCs, which incorporate time-domain processing and digitally assisted analog circuitry. This architecture reduces power consumption and area significantly, without sacrificing performance. The input signal is pulse position modulated and the analog information is carried in the form of timing intervals. Timing measurement accuracy presents a major challenge and we present various methods in which accuracy can be achieved using CMOS processes. This ‘digital’ approach is more power efficient compared with pure analog solutions, utilized for amplitude measurement of input signals.Ph.D.Electrical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64787/1/naraghi_1.pd

Design of high speed folding and interpolating analog-to-digital converter

High-speed and low resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADC) are key elements in the read channel of optical and magnetic data storage systems. The required resolution is about 6-7 bits while the sampling rate and effective resolution bandwidth requirements increase with each generation of storage system. Folding is a technique to reduce the number of comparators used in the flash architecture. By means of an analog preprocessing circuit in folding A/D converters the number of comparators can be reduced significantly. Folding architectures exhibit low power and low latency as well as the ability to run at high sampling rates. Folding ADCs employing interpolation schemes to generate extra folding waveforms are called "Folding and Interpolating ADC" (F&I ADC). The aim of this research is to increase the input bandwidth of high speed conversion, and low latency F&I ADC. Behavioral models are developed to analyze the bandwidth limitation at the architecture level. A front-end sample-and-hold unit is employed to tackle the frequency multiplication problem, which is intrinsic for all F&I ADCs. Current-mode signal processing is adopted to increase the bandwidth of the folding amplifiers and interpolators, which are the bottleneck of the whole system. An operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) based folding amplifier, current mirror-based interpolator, very low impedance fast current comparator are proposed and designed to carry out the current-mode signal processing. A new bit synchronization scheme is proposed to correct the error caused by the delay difference between the coarse and fine channels. A prototype chip was designed and fabricated in 0.35μm CMOS process to verify the ideas. The S/H and F&I ADC prototype is realized in 0.35μm double-poly CMOS process (only one poly is used). Integral nonlinearity (INL) is 1.0 LSB and Differential nonlinearity (DNL) is 0.6 LSB at 110 KHz. The ADC occupies 1.2mm2 active area and dissipates 200mW (excluding 70mW of S/H) from 3.3V supply. At 300MSPS sampling rate, the ADC achieves no less than 6 ENOB with input signal lower than 60MHz. It has the highest input bandwidth of 60MHz reported in the literature for this type of CMOS ADC with similar resolution and sample rate

Design of High-Speed Power-Efficient A/D Converters for Wireline ADC-Based Receiver Applications

Serial input/output (I/O) data rates are increasing in order to support the explosion in network traffic driven by big data applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and etc. As the high-speed data symbol times shrink, this results in an increased amount of inter-symbol interference (ISI) for transmission over both severe low-pass electrical channels and dispersive optical channels. This necessitates increased equalization complexity and consideration of advanced modulation schemes, such as four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4). Serial links which utilize an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) receiver front-end offer a potential solution, as they enable more powerful and flexible digital signal processing (DSP) for equalization and symbol detection and can easily support advanced modulation schemes. Moreover, the DSP back-end provides robustness to process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) variations, benefits from improved area and power with CMOS technology scaling and offers easy design transfer between different technology nodes and thus improved time-to-market. However, ADC-based receivers generally consume higher power relative to their mixed-signal counterparts because of the significant power consumed by conventional multi-GS/s ADC implementations. This motivates exploration of energy-efficient ADC designs with moderate resolution and very high sampling rates to support data rates at or above 50Gb/s. This dissertation presents two power-efficient designs of ≥25GS/s time-interleaved ADCs for ADC-based wireline receivers. The first prototype includes the implementation of a 6b 25GS/s time-interleaved multi-bit search ADC in 65nm CMOS with a soft-decision selection algorithm that provides redundancy for relaxed track-and-hold (T/H) settling and improved metastability tolerance, achieving a figure-of-merit (FoM) of 143fJ/conversion step and 1.76pJ/bit for a PAM-4 receiver design. The second prototype features the design of a 52Gb/s PAM-4 ADC-based receiver in 65nm CMOS, where the front-end consists of a 4-stage continuous-time linear equalizer (CTLE)/variable gain amplifier (VGA) and a 6b 26GS/s time-interleaved SAR ADC with a comparator-assisted 2b/stage structure for reduced digital-to-analog converter (DAC) complexity and a 3-tap embedded feed-forward equalizer (FFE) for relaxed ADC resolution requirement. The receiver front-end achieves an efficiency of 4.53bJ/bit, while compensating for up to 31dB loss with DSP and no transmitter (TX) equalization