2,232 research outputs found
A radiation-hard dual-channel 12-bit 40 MS/s ADC prototype for the ATLAS liquid argon calorimeter readout electronics upgrade at the CERN LHC
The readout electronics upgrade for the ATLAS Liquid Argon Calorimeters at
the CERN Large Hadron Collider requires a radiation-hard ADC. The design of a
radiation-hard dual-channel 12-bit 40 MS/s pipeline ADC for this use is
presented. The design consists of two pipeline A/D channels each with four
Multiplying Digital-to-Analog Converters followed by 8-bit
Successive-Approximation-Register analog-to-digital converters. The custom
design, fabricated in a commercial 130 nm CMOS process, shows a performance of
67.9 dB SNDR at 10 MHz for a single channel at 40 MS/s, with a latency of 87.5
ns (to first bit read out), while its total power consumption is 50 mW/channel.
The chip uses two power supply voltages: 1.2 and 2.5 V. The sensitivity to
single event effects during irradiation is measured and determined to meet the
system requirements
A HIGH-PERFORMANCE AND LOW-POWER DELAY BUFFER
In this paper, presents circuit design of a low-power delay buffer. The proposed delay buffer uses several new techniques to reduce its power consumption. Since delay buffers are accessed sequentially, it adopts a ring-counter addressing scheme. In the ring counter, double-edge-triggered (DET) flip-flops are utilized to reduce the operating frequency by half and the C-element gated-clock strategy is proposed. Both total transistor count and the number of clocked transistors are significantly reduced to improve power consumption and speed in the flip-flop. The number of transistors is reduced by 56%-60% and the Area-Speed-Power product is reduced by 56%-63% compared to other double edge triggered flip-flops. This design is suitable for high-speed, low-power CMOS VLSI design applications
Development of a time-to-digital converter ASIC for the upgrade of the ATLAS Monitored Drift Tube detector
The upgrade of the ATLAS muon spectrometer for high-luminosity LHC requires
new trigger and readout electronics for the various elements of the detector.
We present the design of a time-to-digital converter (TDC) ASIC prototype for
the ATLAS Monitored Drift Tube (MDT) detector. The chip was fabricated in a
GlobalFoundries 130 nm CMOS technology. Studies indicate that its timing and
power consumption characteristics meet the design specifications, with a timing
bin variation of 40 ps for all 48 channels with a power consumption of about
6.5 mW per channel.Comment: 9 pages, 12 figure
A Structured Design Methodology for High Performance VLSI Arrays
abstract: The geometric growth in the integrated circuit technology due to transistor scaling also with system-on-chip design strategy, the complexity of the integrated circuit has increased manifold. Short time to market with high reliability and performance is one of the most competitive challenges. Both custom and ASIC design methodologies have evolved over the time to cope with this but the high manual labor in custom and statistic design in ASIC are still causes of concern. This work proposes a new circuit design strategy that focuses mostly on arrayed structures like TLB, RF, Cache, IPCAM etc. that reduces the manual effort to a great extent and also makes the design regular, repetitive still achieving high performance. The method proposes making the complete design custom schematic but using the standard cells. This requires adding some custom cells to the already exhaustive library to optimize the design for performance. Once schematic is finalized, the designer places these standard cells in a spreadsheet, placing closely the cells in the critical paths. A Perl script then generates Cadence Encounter compatible placement file. The design is then routed in Encounter. Since designer is the best judge of the circuit architecture, placement by the designer will allow achieve most optimal design. Several designs like IPCAM, issue logic, TLB, RF and Cache designs were carried out and the performance were compared against the fully custom and ASIC flow. The TLB, RF and Cache were the part of the HEMES microprocessor.Dissertation/ThesisPh.D. Electrical Engineering 201
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Development of a Portable CMOS Time-Domain Fluorescence Lifetime Imager
Modern laboratory equipments to measure the excited-state lifetime of fluorophores usually include an expensive picosecond pulsed-laser excitation source, a fragile photomultiplier tube, and a large instrument body for optics. A portable and robust device to make fluorescence lifetime measurement in nanosecond scale is of great attraction for chemists and biologists.
This dissertation reports the development of a portable LED time-domain fluorimeter from an all-solid-state discrete-component prototype to its advanced CMOS integrated circuit implementation. The motivation of the research is to develop a multiplexed fluorimeter for point-of-care diagnosis. Instruments developed by this novel method have higher fill factor, are more portable, and are fabricated at lower cost
Embedding Logic and Non-volatile Devices in CMOS Digital Circuits for Improving Energy Efficiency
abstract: Static CMOS logic has remained the dominant design style of digital systems for
more than four decades due to its robustness and near zero standby current. Static
CMOS logic circuits consist of a network of combinational logic cells and clocked sequential
elements, such as latches and flip-flops that are used for sequencing computations
over time. The majority of the digital design techniques to reduce power, area, and
leakage over the past four decades have focused almost entirely on optimizing the
combinational logic. This work explores alternate architectures for the flip-flops for
improving the overall circuit performance, power and area. It consists of three main
sections.
First, is the design of a multi-input configurable flip-flop structure with embedded
logic. A conventional D-type flip-flop may be viewed as realizing an identity function,
in which the output is simply the value of the input sampled at the clock edge. In
contrast, the proposed multi-input flip-flop, named PNAND, can be configured to
realize one of a family of Boolean functions called threshold functions. In essence,
the PNAND is a circuit implementation of the well-known binary perceptron. Unlike
other reconfigurable circuits, a PNAND can be configured by simply changing the
assignment of signals to its inputs. Using a standard cell library of such gates, a technology
mapping algorithm can be applied to transform a given netlist into one with
an optimal mixture of conventional logic gates and threshold gates. This approach
was used to fabricate a 32-bit Wallace Tree multiplier and a 32-bit booth multiplier
in 65nm LP technology. Simulation and chip measurements show more than 30%
improvement in dynamic power and more than 20% reduction in core area.
The functional yield of the PNAND reduces with geometry and voltage scaling.
The second part of this research investigates the use of two mechanisms to improve
the robustness of the PNAND circuit architecture. One is the use of forward and reverse body biases to change the device threshold and the other is the use of RRAM
devices for low voltage operation.
The third part of this research focused on the design of flip-flops with non-volatile
storage. Spin-transfer torque magnetic tunnel junctions (STT-MTJ) are integrated
with both conventional D-flipflop and the PNAND circuits to implement non-volatile
logic (NVL). These non-volatile storage enhanced flip-flops are able to save the state of
system locally when a power interruption occurs. However, manufacturing variations
in the STT-MTJs and in the CMOS transistors significantly reduce the yield, leading
to an overly pessimistic design and consequently, higher energy consumption. A
detailed analysis of the design trade-offs in the driver circuitry for performing backup
and restore, and a novel method to design the energy optimal driver for a given yield is
presented. Efficient designs of two nonvolatile flip-flop (NVFF) circuits are presented,
in which the backup time is determined on a per-chip basis, resulting in minimizing
the energy wastage and satisfying the yield constraint. To achieve a yield of 98%,
the conventional approach would have to expend nearly 5X more energy than the
minimum required, whereas the proposed tunable approach expends only 26% more
energy than the minimum. A non-volatile threshold gate architecture NV-TLFF are
designed with the same backup and restore circuitry in 65nm technology. The embedded
logic in NV-TLFF compensates performance overhead of NVL. This leads to the
possibility of zero-overhead non-volatile datapath circuits. An 8-bit multiply-and-
accumulate (MAC) unit is designed to demonstrate the performance benefits of the
proposed architecture. Based on the results of HSPICE simulations, the MAC circuit
with the proposed NV-TLFF cells is shown to consume at least 20% less power and
area as compared to the circuit designed with conventional DFFs, without sacrificing
any performance.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 201
Single Event Effects in the Pixel readout chip for BTeV
In future experiments the readout electronics for pixel detectors is required
to be resistant to a very high radiation level. In this paper we report on
irradiation tests performed on several preFPIX2 prototype pixel readout chips
for the BTeV experiment exposed to a 200 MeV proton beam. The prototype chips
have been implemented in commercial 0.25 um CMOS processes following radiation
tolerant design rules. The results show that this ASIC design tolerates a large
total radiation dose, and that radiation induced Single Event Effects occur at
a manageable level.Comment: 15 pages, 6 Postscript figure
Integrated Circuit Design for Hybrid Optoelectronic Interconnects
This dissertation focuses on high-speed circuit design for the integration of hybrid optoelectronic interconnects. It bridges the gap between electronic circuit design and optical device design by seamlessly incorporating the compact Verilog-A model for optical components into the SPICE-like simulation environment, such as the Cadence design tool.
Optical components fabricated in the IME 130nm SOI CMOS process are characterized. Corresponding compact Verilog-A models for Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) device are developed. With this approach, electro-optical co-design and hybrid simulation are made possible.
The developed optical models are used for analyzing the system-level specifications of an MZM based optoelectronic transceiver link. Link power budgets for NRZ, PAM-4 and PAM-8 signaling modulations are simulated at system-level. The optimal transmitter extinction ratio (ER) is derived based on the required receiver\u27s minimum optical modulation amplitude (OMA).
A limiting receiver is fabricated in the IBM 130 nm CMOS process. By side- by-side wire-bonding to a commercial high-speed InGaAs/InP PIN photodiode, we demonstrate that the hybrid optoelectronic limiting receiver can achieve the bit error rate (BER) of 10-12 with a -6.7 dBm sensitivity at 4 Gb/s.
A full-rate, 4-channel 29-1 length parallel PRBS is fabricated in the IBM 130 nm SiGe BiCMOS process. Together with a 10 GHz phase locked loop (PLL) designed from system architecture to transistor level design, the PRBS is demonstrated operating at more than 10 Gb/s. Lessons learned from high-speed PCB design, dealing with signal integrity issue regarding to the PCB transmission line are summarized
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