18 research outputs found
Analysis and Design of Energy Efficient Frequency Synthesizers for Wireless Integrated Systems
Advances in ultra-low power (ULP) circuit technologies are expanding the IoT applications in our daily life. However, wireless connectivity, small form factor and long lifetime are still the key constraints for many envisioned wearable, implantable and maintenance-free monitoring systems to be practically deployed at a large scale. The frequency synthesizer is one of the most power hungry and complicated blocks that not only constraints RF performance but also offers subtle scalability with power as well. Furthermore, the only indispensable off-chip component, the crystal oscillator, is also associated with the frequency synthesizer as a reference.
This thesis addresses the above issues by analyzing how phase noise of the LO affect the frequency modulated wireless system in different aspects and how different noise sources in the PLL affect the performance. Several chip prototypes have been demonstrated including: 1) An ULP FSK transmitter with SAR assisted FLL; 2) A ring oscillator based all-digital BLE transmitter utilizing a quarter RF frequency LO and 4X frequency multiplier; and 3) An XO-less BLE transmitter with an RF reference recovery receiver. The first 2 designs deal with noise sources in the PLL loop for ultimate power and cost reduction, while the third design deals with the reference noise outside the PLL and explores a way to replace the XO in ULP wireless edge nodes. And at last, a comprehensive PN theory is proposed as the design guideline.PHDElectrical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/153420/1/chenxing_1.pd
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
๊ณ ์ ์๋ฆฌ์ผ ๋งํฌ๋ฅผ ์ํ ๊ณ ๋ฆฌ ๋ฐ์ง๊ธฐ๋ฅผ ๊ธฐ๋ฐ์ผ๋ก ํ๋ ์ฃผํ์ ํฉ์ฑ๊ธฐ
ํ์๋
ผ๋ฌธ(๋ฐ์ฌ) -- ์์ธ๋ํ๊ต๋ํ์ : ๊ณต๊ณผ๋ํ ์ ๊ธฐยท์ ๋ณด๊ณตํ๋ถ, 2022. 8. ์ ๋๊ท .In this dissertation, major concerns in the clocking of modern serial links are discussed. As sub-rate, multi-standard architectures are becoming predominant, the conventional clocking methodology seems to necessitate innovation in terms of low-cost implementation. Frequency synthesis with active, inductor-less oscillators replacing LC counterparts are reviewed, and solutions for two major drawbacks are proposed. Each solution is verified by prototype chip design, giving a possibility that the inductor-less oscillator may become a proper candidate for future high-speed serial links.
To mitigate the high flicker noise of a high-frequency ring oscillator (RO), a reference multiplication technique that effectively extends the bandwidth of the following all-digital phase-locked loop (ADPLL) is proposed. The technique avoids any jitter accumulation, generating a clean mid-frequency clock, overall achieving high jitter performance in conjunction with the ADPLL. Timing constraint for the proper reference multiplication is first analyzed to determine the calibration points that may correct the existent phase errors. The weight for each calibration point is updated by the proposed a priori probability-based least-mean-square (LMS) algorithm. To minimize the time required for the calibration, each gain for the weight update is adaptively varied by deducing a posteriori which error source dominates the others. The prototype chip is fabricated in a 40-nm CMOS technology, and its measurement results verify the low-jitter, high-frequency clock generation with fast calibration settling. The presented work achieves an rms jitter of 177/223 fs at 8/16-GHz output, consuming 12.1/17-mW power.
As the second embodiment, an RO-based ADPLL with an analog technique that addresses the high supply sensitivity of the RO is presented. Unlike prior arts, the circuit for the proposed technique does not extort the RO voltage headroom, allowing high-frequency oscillation. Further, the performance given from the technique is robust over process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) variations, avoiding the use of additional calibration hardware. Lastly, a comprehensive analysis of phase noise contribution is conducted for the overall ADPLL, followed by circuit optimizations, to retain the low-jitter output. Implemented in a 40-nm CMOS technology, the frequency synthesizer achieves an rms jitter of 289 fs at 8 GHz output without any injected supply noise. Under a 20-mVrms white supply noise, the ADPLL suppresses supply-noise-induced jitter by -23.8 dB.๋ณธ ๋
ผ๋ฌธ์ ํ๋ ์๋ฆฌ์ผ ๋งํฌ์ ํด๋ฝํน์ ๊ด์ฌ๋๋ ์ฃผ์ํ ๋ฌธ์ ๋ค์ ๋ํ์ฌ ๊ธฐ์ ํ๋ค. ์ค์๋, ๋ค์ค ํ์ค ๊ตฌ์กฐ๋ค์ด ์ฑํ๋๊ณ ์๋ ์ถ์ธ์ ๋ฐ๋ผ, ๊ธฐ์กด์ ํด๋ผํน ๋ฐฉ๋ฒ์ ๋ฎ์ ๋น์ฉ์ ๊ตฌํ์ ๊ด์ ์์ ์๋ก์ด ํ์ ์ ํ์๋ก ํ๋ค. LC ๊ณต์ง๊ธฐ๋ฅผ ๋์ ํ์ฌ ๋ฅ๋ ์์ ๋ฐ์ง๊ธฐ๋ฅผ ์ฌ์ฉํ ์ฃผํ์ ํฉ์ฑ์ ๋ํ์ฌ ์์๋ณด๊ณ , ์ด์ ๋ฐ์ํ๋ ๋๊ฐ์ง ์ฃผ์ ๋ฌธ์ ์ ๊ณผ ๊ฐ๊ฐ์ ๋ํ ํด๊ฒฐ ๋ฐฉ์์ ํ์ํ๋ค. ๊ฐ ์ ์ ๋ฐฉ๋ฒ์ ํ๋กํ ํ์
์นฉ์ ํตํด ๊ทธ ํจ์ฉ์ฑ์ ๊ฒ์ฆํ๊ณ , ์ด์ด์ ๋ฅ๋ ์์ ๋ฐ์ง๊ธฐ๊ฐ ๋ฏธ๋์ ๊ณ ์ ์๋ฆฌ์ผ ๋งํฌ์ ํด๋ฝํน์ ์ฌ์ฉ๋ ๊ฐ๋ฅ์ฑ์ ๋ํด ๊ฒํ ํ๋ค.
์ฒซ๋ฒ์งธ ์์ฐ์ผ๋ก์จ, ๊ณ ์ฃผํ ๊ณ ๋ฆฌ ๋ฐ์ง๊ธฐ์ ๋์ ํ๋ฆฌ์ปค ์ก์์ ์ํ์ํค๊ธฐ ์ํด ๊ธฐ์ค ์ ํธ๋ฅผ ๋ฐฐ์ํํ์ฌ ๋ท๋จ์ ์์ ๊ณ ์ ๋ฃจํ์ ๋์ญํญ์ ํจ๊ณผ์ ์ผ๋ก ๊ทน๋ํ ์ํค๋ ํ๋ก ๊ธฐ์ ์ ์ ์ํ๋ค. ๋ณธ ๊ธฐ์ ์ ์งํฐ๋ฅผ ๋์ ์ํค์ง ์์ผ๋ฉฐ ๋ฐ๋ผ์ ๊นจ๋ํ ์ค๊ฐ ์ฃผํ์ ํด๋ฝ์ ์์ฑ์์ผ ์์ ๊ณ ์ ๋ฃจํ์ ํจ๊ป ๋์ ์ฑ๋ฅ์ ๊ณ ์ฃผํ ํด๋ฝ์ ํฉ์ฑํ๋ค. ๊ธฐ์ค ์ ํธ๋ฅผ ์ฑ๊ณต์ ์ผ๋ก ๋ฐฐ์ํํ๊ธฐ ์ํ ํ์ด๋ฐ ์กฐ๊ฑด๋ค์ ๋จผ์ ๋ถ์ํ์ฌ ํ์ด๋ฐ ์ค๋ฅ๋ฅผ ์ ๊ฑฐํ๊ธฐ ์ํ ๋ฐฉ๋ฒ๋ก ์ ํ์
ํ๋ค. ๊ฐ ๊ต์ ์ค๋์ ์ฐ์ญ์ ํ๋ฅ ์ ๊ธฐ๋ฐ์ผ๋กํ LMS ์๊ณ ๋ฆฌ์ฆ์ ํตํด ๊ฐฑ์ ๋๋๋ก ์ค๊ณ๋๋ค. ๊ต์ ์ ํ์ํ ์๊ฐ์ ์ต์ํ ํ๊ธฐ ์ํ์ฌ, ๊ฐ ๊ต์ ์ด๋์ ํ์ด๋ฐ ์ค๋ฅ ๊ทผ์๋ค์ ํฌ๊ธฐ๋ฅผ ๊ท๋ฉ์ ์ผ๋ก ์ถ๋ก ํ ๊ฐ์ ๋ฐํ์ผ๋ก ์ง์์ ์ผ๋ก ์ ์ด๋๋ค. 40-nm CMOS ๊ณต์ ์ผ๋ก ๊ตฌํ๋ ํ๋กํ ํ์
์นฉ์ ์ธก์ ์ ํตํด ์ ์์, ๊ณ ์ฃผํ ํด๋ฝ์ ๋น ๋ฅธ ๊ต์ ์๊ฐ์์ ํฉ์ฑํด ๋์ ํ์ธํ์๋ค. ์ด๋ 177/223 fs์ rms ์งํฐ๋ฅผ ๊ฐ์ง๋ 8/16 GHz์ ํด๋ฝ์ ์ถ๋ ฅํ๋ค.
๋๋ฒ์งธ ์์ฐ์ผ๋ก์จ, ๊ณ ๋ฆฌ ๋ฐ์ง๊ธฐ์ ๋์ ์ ์ ๋
ธ์ด์ฆ ์์กด์ฑ์ ์ํ์ํค๋ ๊ธฐ์ ์ด ํฌํจ๋ ์ฃผํ์ ํฉ์ฑ๊ธฐ๊ฐ ์ค๊ณ๋์๋ค. ์ด๋ ๊ณ ๋ฆฌ ๋ฐ์ง๊ธฐ์ ์ ์ ํค๋๋ฃธ์ ๋ณด์กดํจ์ผ๋ก์ ๊ณ ์ฃผํ ๋ฐ์ง์ ๊ฐ๋ฅํ๊ฒ ํ๋ค. ๋์๊ฐ, ์ ์ ๋
ธ์ด์ฆ ๊ฐ์ ์ฑ๋ฅ์ ๊ณต์ , ์ ์, ์จ๋ ๋ณ๋์ ๋ํ์ฌ ๋ฏผ๊ฐํ์ง ์์ผ๋ฉฐ, ๋ฐ๋ผ์ ์ถ๊ฐ์ ์ธ ๊ต์ ํ๋ก๋ฅผ ํ์๋ก ํ์ง ์๋๋ค. ๋ง์ง๋ง์ผ๋ก, ์์ ๋
ธ์ด์ฆ์ ๋ํ ํฌ๊ด์ ๋ถ์๊ณผ ํ๋ก ์ต์ ํ๋ฅผ ํตํ์ฌ ์ฃผํ์ ํฉ์ฑ๊ธฐ์ ์ ์ก์ ์ถ๋ ฅ์ ๋ฐฉํดํ์ง ์๋ ๋ฐฉ๋ฒ์ ๊ณ ์ํ์๋ค. ํด๋น ํ๋กํ ํ์
์นฉ์ 40-nm CMOS ๊ณต์ ์ผ๋ก ๊ตฌํ๋์์ผ๋ฉฐ, ์ ์ ๋
ธ์ด์ฆ๊ฐ ์ธ๊ฐ๋์ง ์์ ์ํ์์ 289 fs์ rms ์งํฐ๋ฅผ ๊ฐ์ง๋ 8 GHz์ ํด๋ฝ์ ์ถ๋ ฅํ๋ค. ๋ํ, 20 mVrms์ ์ ์ ๋
ธ์ด์ฆ๊ฐ ์ธ๊ฐ๋์์ ๋์ ์ ๋๋๋ ์งํฐ์ ์์ -23.8 dB ๋งํผ ์ค์ด๋ ๊ฒ์ ํ์ธํ์๋ค.1 Introduction 1
1.1 Motivation 3
1.1.1 Clocking in High-Speed Serial Links 4
1.1.2 Multi-Phase, High-Frequency Clock Conversion 8
1.2 Dissertation Objectives 10
2 RO-Based High-Frequency Synthesis 12
2.1 Phase-Locked Loop Fundamentals 12
2.2 Toward All-Digital Regime 15
2.3 RO Design Challenges 21
2.3.1 Oscillator Phase Noise 21
2.3.2 Challenge 1: High Flicker Noise 23
2.3.3 Challenge 2: High Supply Noise Sensitivity 26
3 Filtering RO Noise 28
3.1 Introduction 28
3.2 Proposed Reference Octupler 34
3.2.1 Delay Constraint 34
3.2.2 Phase Error Calibration 38
3.2.3 Circuit Implementation 51
3.3 IL-ADPLL Implementation 55
3.4 Measurement Results 59
3.5 Summary 63
4 RO Supply Noise Compensation 69
4.1 Introduction 69
4.2 Proposed Analog Closed Loop for Supply Noise Compensation 72
4.2.1 Circuit Implementation 73
4.2.2 Frequency-Domain Analysis 76
4.2.3 Circuit Optimization 81
4.3 ADPLL Implementation 87
4.4 Measurement Results 90
4.5 Summary 98
5 Conclusions 99
A Notes on the 8REF 102
B Notes on the ACSC 105๋ฐ
Techniques for high-performance digital frequency synthesis and phase control
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 183-190).This thesis presents a 3.6-GHz, 500-kHz bandwidth digital [delta][sigma] frequency synthesizer architecture that leverages a recently invented noise-shaping time-to-digital converter (TDC) and an all-digital quantization noise cancellation technique to achieve excellent in-band and out-of-band phase noise, respectively. In addition, a passive digital-to-analog converter (DAC) structure is proposed as an efficient interface between the digital loop filter and a conventional hybrid voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) to create a digitally-controlled oscillator (DCO). An asynchronous divider structure is presented which lowers the required TDC range and avoids the divide-value-dependent delay variation. The prototype is implemented in a 0.13-am CMOS process and its active area occupies 0.95 mmยฒ. Operating under 1.5 V, the core parts, excluding the VCO output buffer, dissipate 26 mA. Measured phase noise at 3.67 GHz achieves -108 dBc/Hz and -150 dBc/Hz at 400 kHz and 20 MHz, respectively. Integrated phase noise at this carrier frequency yields 204 fs of jitter (measured from 1 kHz to 40 MHz). In addition, a 3.2-Gb/s delay-locked loop (DLL) in a 0.18-[mu]m CMOS for chip-tochip communications is presented. By leveraging the fractional-N synthesizer technique, this architecture provides a digitally-controlled delay adjustment with a fine resolution and infinite range. The provided delay resolution is less sensitive to the process, voltage, and temperature variations than conventional techniques. A new [delta][sigma] modulator enables a compact and low-power implementation of this architecture. A simple bang-bang detector is used for phase detection. The prototype operates at a 1.8-V supply voltage with a current consumption of 55 mA. The phase resolution and differential rms clock jitter are 1.4 degrees and 3.6 ps, respectively.by Chun-Ming Hsu.Ph.D
On-Chip Analog Circuit Design Using Built-In Self-Test and an Integrated Multi-Dimensional Optimization Platform
Nowadays, the rapid development of system-on-chip (SoC) market introduces
tremendous complexity into the integrated circuit (IC) design. Meanwhile, the IC
fabrication process is scaling down to allow higher density of integration but makes
the chips more sensitive to the process-voltage-temperature (PVT) variations. A
successful IC product not only imposes great pressure on the IC designers, who have
to handle wider variations and enforce more design margins, but also challenges the
test procedure, leading to more check points and longer test time. To relax the
designersโ burden and reduce the cost of testing, it is valuable to make the IC chips
able to test and tune itself to some extent.
In this dissertation, a fully integrated in-situ design validation and optimization
(VO) hardware for analog circuits is proposed. It implements in-situ built-in self-test
(BIST) techniques for analog circuits. Based on the data collected from BIST,
the error between the measured and the desired performance of the target circuit is
evaluated using a cost function. A digital multi-dimensional optimization engine is
implemented to adaptively adjust the analog circuit parameters, seeking the minimum
value of the cost function and achieving the desired performance. To verify
this concept, study cases of a 2nd/4th active-RC band-pass filter (BPF) and a 2nd
order Gm-C BPF, as well as all BIST and optimization blocks, are adopted on-chip.
Apart from the VO system, several improved BIST techniques are also proposed
in this dissertation. A single-tone sinusoidal waveform generator based on a finite-impulse-response (FIR) architecture, which utilizes an optimization algorithm to
enhance its spur free dynamic range (SFDR), is proposed. It achieves an SFDR of
59 to 70 dBc from 150 to 850 MHz after the optimization procedure. A low-distortion
current-steering two-tone sinusoidal signal synthesizer based on a mixing-FIR architecture is also proposed. The two-tone synthesizer extends the FIR architecture to
two stages and implements an up-conversion mixer to generate the two tones, achieving better than -68 dBc IM3 below 480 MHz LO frequency without calibration.
Moreover, an on-chip RF receiver linearity BIST methodology for continuous and
discrete-time hybrid baseband chain is proposed. The proposed receiver chain
implements a charge-domain FIR filter to notch the two excitation signals but expose
the third order intermodulation (IM3) tones. It simplifies the linearity measurement
procedureโusing a power detector is enough to analyze the receiverโs linearity.
Finally, a low cost fully digital built-in analog tester for linear-time-invariant
(LTI) analog blocks is proposed. It adopts a time-to-digital converter (TDC) to
measure the delays corresponded to a ramp excitation signal and is able to estimate
the pole or zero locations of a low-pass LTI system
Digital Intensive Mixed Signal Circuits with In-situ Performance Monitors
University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation.November 2016. Major: Electrical/Computer Engineering. Advisor: Chris Kim. 1 computer file (PDF); x, 137 pages.Digital intensive circuit design techniques of different mixed-signal systems such as data converters, clock generators, voltage regulators etc. are gaining attention for the implementation of modern microprocessors and system-on-chips (SoCs) in order to fully utilize the benefits of CMOS technology scaling. Moreover different performance improvement schemes, for example, noise reduction, spur cancellation, linearity improvement etc. can be easily performed in digital domain. In addition to that, increasing speed and complexity of modern SoCs necessitate the requirement of in-situ measurement schemes, primarily for high volume testing. In-situ measurements not only obviate the need for expensive measurement equipments and probing techniques, but also reduce the test time significantly when a large number of chips are required to be tested. Several digital intensive circuit design techniques are proposed in this dissertation along with different in-situ performance monitors for a variety of mixed signal systems. First, a novel beat frequency quantization technique is proposed in a two-step VCO quantizer based ADC implementation for direct digital conversion of low amplitude bio- potential signals. By direct conversion, it alleviates the requirement of the area and power consuming analog-frontend (AFE) used in a conventional ADC designs. This prototype design is realized in a 65nm CMOS technology. Measured SNDR is 44.5dB from a 10mVpp, 300Hz signal and power consumption is only 38ฮผW. Next, three different clock generation circuits, a phase-locked loop (PLL), a multiplying delay-locked loop (MDLL) and a frequency-locked loop (FLL) are presented. First a 0.4-to-1.6GHz sub-sampling fractional-N all digital PLL architecture is discussed that utilizes a D-flip-flop as a digital sub-sampler. Measurement results from a 65nm CMOS test-chip shows 5dB lower phase noise at 100KHz offset frequency, compared to a conventional architecture. The Digital PLL (DPLL) architecture is further extended for a digital MDLL implementation in order to suppress the VCO phase noise beyond the DPLL bandwidth. A zero-offset aperture phase detector (APD) and a digital- to-time converter (DTC) are employed for static phase-offset (SPO) cancellation. A unique in-situ detection circuitry achieves a high resolution SPO measurement in time domain. A 65nm test-chip shows 0.2-to-1.45GHz output frequency range while reducing the phase-noise by 9dB compared to a DPLL. Next, a frequency-to-current converter (FTC) based fractional FLL is proposed for a low accuracy clock generation in an extremely low area for IoT application. High density deep-trench capacitors are used for area reduction. The test-chip is fabricated in a 32nm SOI technology that takes only 0.0054mm2 active area. A high-resolution in-situ period jitter measurement block is also incorporated in this design. Finally, a time based digital low dropout (DLDO) regulator architecture is proposed for fine grain power delivery over a wide load current dynamic range and input/output voltage in order to facilitate dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). High- resolution beat frequency detector dynamically adjusts the loop sampling frequency for ripple and settling time reduction due to load transients. A fixed steady-state voltage offset provides inherent active voltage positioning (AVP) for ripple reduction. Circuit simulations in a 65nm technology show more than 90% current efficiency for 100X load current variation, while it can operate for an input voltage range of 0.6V โ 1.2V
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Low power VCO-based analog-to-digital conversion
textThis dissertation presents novel two stage ADC architecture with a VCO based second stage. With the scaling of the supply voltages in modern CMOS process it is difficult to design high gain operational amplifiers needed for traditional voltage domain two-stage analog to digital converters. However time resolution continues to improve with the advancement in CMOS technology making VCO-based ADC more attractive. The nonlinearity in voltage-to-frequency transfer function is the biggest challenge in design of VCO based ADC. The hybrid approach used in this work uses a voltage domain first stage to determine the most significant bits and uses a VCO based second stage to quantize the small residue obtained from first stage. The architecture relaxes the gain requirement on the the first stage opamp and also relaxes the linearity requirements on the second stage VCO. The prototype ADC built in 65nm CMOS process achieves 63.7dB SNDR in 10MHz bandwidth while only consuming 1.1mW of power. The performance of the prototype chip is comparable to the state-of-art in terms of figure-of-merit but this new architecture uses significantly less circuit area.Electrical and Computer Engineerin
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Voltage and Time-Domain Analog Circuit Techniques for Scaled CMOS Technologies
CMOS technology scaling has resulted in reduced supply voltage and intrinsic voltage gain of the transistor. This presents challenges to the analog circuit designers due to lower signal swing and achievable signal to noise ratio (SNR), leading to increased power consumption. At the same time, device speed has increased in lower design nodes, which has not been directly beneficial for analog circuit design. This thesis presents voltage-domain and time-domain circuit scaling friendly circuit architectures that minimize the power consumption and benefit from the increasing transistor speeds.
In the voltage-domain, an on-the-fly gain selection block is demonstrated as an alternative to the traditional MDAC architecture to enhance the input dynamic range of a medium-resolution medium-speed analog-to-digital converter (ADC) at reduced supply voltages. The proposed design also eliminates the need for a reference buffer, thus providing power savings. The measured prototype enhances the input dynamic range of a 12bit, 40MSPS ADC to 80.6dB at 1.2V supply voltage.
In the time-domain, a generic circuit design approach is presented, followed by an in-depth analysis of Voltage-Controlled-Oscillator based Operational Transconductance Amplifiers (VCO-OTAs). A discrete-time-domain small-signal model based on the zero crossings of the internal VCOs is developed to predict the stability, the step response, and the frequency response of the circuit when placed in feedback. The model accurately predicts the circuit behavior for an arbitrary input frequency, even as the VCO free-running frequency approaches the unity-gain bandwidth of the closed-loop system, where other intuitive small-signal models available in the literature fail.
Next, we present an application of VCO-OTA in designing a baseband trans-impedance amplifier (TIA) for current-mode receivers as a scaling-friendly and power-efficient alternative to the inverter-based OTA. We illustrate a design methodology for the choice of the VCO-OTA parameters in the context of a receiver design with an example of a 20MHz RF-channel-bandwidth receiver operating at 2GHz. Receiver simulation results demonstrate an improvement of up to 12dB in blocker 1dB compression point (B1dB) for slightly higher power consumption or up to 2.6x power reduction of the TIA resulting in up to 2x power reduction of the receiver for similar B1dB performance.
Next, we present some examples of VCO-OTAs. We first illustrate the benefit of a VCO-OTA in a low-dropout-voltage regulator to achieve a dropout voltage of only100mV and operating down to 0.8V input supply, compared to the prototype based on traditional OTA with a minimum dropout voltage of 150mV, operating at a minimum of 1.2V supply. Both the capacitor-less prototypes can drive up to 1nF load capacitor and provide a current of 60mA. The next prototype showcases a method to reduce the power consumption of a VCO-OTA and spurs at the VCO frequency, with an application in the design of a fourth-order Butterworth filter at 4MHz. The thesis concludes with a design example of 0.2V VCO-OTA
Time-Mode Analog Circuit Design for Nanometric Technologies
Rapid scaling in technology has introduced new challenges in the realm of traditional analog design. Scaling of supply voltage directly impacts the available voltage-dynamic-range. On the other hand, nanometric technologies with fT in the hundreds of GHz range open opportunities for time-resolution-based signal processing. With reduced available voltage-dynamic-range and improved timing resolution, it is more convenient to devise analog circuits whose performance depends on edge-timing precision rather than voltage levels. Thus, instead of representing the data/information in the voltage-mode, as a difference between two node voltages, it should be represented in time-mode as a time-difference between two rising and/or falling edges. This dissertation addresses the feasibility of employing time-mode analog circuit design in different applications. Specifically: 1) Time-mode-based quanitzer and feedback DAC of SigmaDelta ADC. 2) Time-mode-based low-THD 10MHz oscillator, 3) A Spur-Frequency Boosting PLL with -74dBc Reference-Spur Rejection in 90nm Digital CMOS.
In the first project, a new architectural solution is proposed to replace the DAC and the quantizer by a Time-to-Digital converter. The architecture has been fabricated in 65nm and shows that this technology node is capable of achieving a time-matching of 800fs which has never been reported. In addition, a competitive figure-of-merit is achieved.
In the low-THD oscillator, I proposed a new architectural solution for synthesizing a highly-linear sinusoidal signal using a novel harmonic rejection approach. The chip is fabricated in 130nm technology and shows an outstanding performance compared to the state of the art. The designed consumes 80% less power; consumes less area; provides much higher amplitude while being composed of purely digital circuits and passive elements.
Last but not least, the spur-frequency boosting PLL employs a novel technique that eliminates the reference spurs. Instead of adding additional filtering at the reference frequency, the spur frequency is boosted to higher frequency which is, naturally, has higher filtering effects. The prototype is fabricated in 90nm digital CMOS and proved to provide the lowest normalized reference spurs ever reported