783 research outputs found

    Baseband analog front-end and digital back-end for reconfigurable multi-standard terminals

    Get PDF
    Multimedia applications are driving wireless network operators to add high-speed data services such as Edge (E-GPRS), WCDMA (UMTS) and WLAN (IEEE 802.11a,b,g) to the existing GSM network. This creates the need for multi-mode cellular handsets that support a wide range of communication standards, each with a different RF frequency, signal bandwidth, modulation scheme etc. This in turn generates several design challenges for the analog and digital building blocks of the physical layer. In addition to the above-mentioned protocols, mobile devices often include Bluetooth, GPS, FM-radio and TV services that can work concurrently with data and voice communication. Multi-mode, multi-band, and multi-standard mobile terminals must satisfy all these different requirements. Sharing and/or switching transceiver building blocks in these handsets is mandatory in order to extend battery life and/or reduce cost. Only adaptive circuits that are able to reconfigure themselves within the handover time can meet the design requirements of a single receiver or transmitter covering all the different standards while ensuring seamless inter-interoperability. This paper presents analog and digital base-band circuits that are able to support GSM (with Edge), WCDMA (UMTS), WLAN and Bluetooth using reconfigurable building blocks. The blocks can trade off power consumption for performance on the fly, depending on the standard to be supported and the required QoS (Quality of Service) leve

    Parallel-sampling ADC architecture for power-efficient broadband multi-carrier systems

    Get PDF

    High linearity analog and mixed-signal integrated circuit design

    Get PDF
    Linearity is one of the most important specifications in electrical circuits.;In Chapter 1, a ladder-based transconductance networks has been adopted first time to build a low distortion analog filters for low frequency applications. This new technique eliminated the limitation of the application with the traditional passive resistors for low frequency applications. Based on the understanding of this relationship, a strategy for designing high linear analog continuous-time filters has been developed. According to our strategy, a prototype analog integrated filter has been designed and fabricated with AMI05 0.5 um standard CMOS process. Experimental results proved this technique has the ability to provide excellent linearity with very limited active area.;In Chapter 2, the relationships between the transconductance networks and major circuit specifications have been explored. The analysis reveals the trade off between the silicon area saved by the transconductance networks and the some other important specifications such as linearity, noise level and the process variations of the overall circuit. Experimental results of discrete component circuit matched very well with our analytical outcomes to predict the change of linearity and noise performance associated with different transconductance networks.;The Chapter 3 contains the analysis and mathematical proves of the optimum passive area allocations for several most popular analog active filters. Because the total area is now manageable by the technique introduced in the Chapter 1, the further reduce of the total area will be very important and useful for efficient utilizing the silicon area, especially with the today\u27s fast growing area efficiency of the highly density digital circuits. This study presents the mathematical conclusion that the minimum passive area will be achieved with the equalized resistor and capacitor.;In the Chapter 4, a well recognized and highly honored current division circuit has been studied. Although it was claimed to be inherently linear and there are over 60 published works reported with high linearity based on this technique, our study discovered that this current division circuit can achieve, if proper circuit condition being managed, very limited linearity and all the experimental verified performance actually based on more general circuit principle. Besides its limitation, however, we invented a novel current division digital to analog converter (DAC) based on this technique. Benefiting from the simple circuit structure and moderate good linearity, a prototype 8-bit DAC was designed in TSMC018 0.2 um CMOS process and the post layout simulations exhibited the good linearity with very low power consumption and extreme small active area.;As the part of study of the output stage for the current division DAC discussed in the Chapter 4, a current mirror is expected to amplify the output current to drive the low resistive load. The strategy of achieving the optimum bandwidth of the cascode current mirror with fixed total current gain is discussed in the Chapter 5.;Improving the linearity of pipeline ADC has been the hottest and hardest topic in solid-state circuit community for decade. In the Chapter 6, a comprehensive study focus on the existing calibration algorithms for pipeline ADCs is presented. The benefits and limitations of different calibration algorithms have been discussed. Based on the understanding of those reported works, a new model-based calibration is delivered. The simulation results demonstrate that the model-based algorithms are vulnerable to the model accuracy and this weakness is very hard to be removed. From there, we predict the future developments of calibration algorithms that can break the linearity limitations for pipelined ADC. (Abstract shortened by UMI.

    Design and debugging of multi-step analog to digital converters

    Get PDF
    With the fast advancement of CMOS fabrication technology, more and more signal-processing functions are implemented in the digital domain for a lower cost, lower power consumption, higher yield, and higher re-configurability. The trend of increasing integration level for integrated circuits has forced the A/D converter interface to reside on the same silicon in complex mixed-signal ICs containing mostly digital blocks for DSP and control. However, specifications of the converters in various applications emphasize high dynamic range and low spurious spectral performance. It is nontrivial to achieve this level of linearity in a monolithic environment where post-fabrication component trimming or calibration is cumbersome to implement for certain applications or/and for cost and manufacturability reasons. Additionally, as CMOS integrated circuits are accomplishing unprecedented integration levels, potential problems associated with device scaling – the short-channel effects – are also looming large as technology strides into the deep-submicron regime. The A/D conversion process involves sampling the applied analog input signal and quantizing it to its digital representation by comparing it to reference voltages before further signal processing in subsequent digital systems. Depending on how these functions are combined, different A/D converter architectures can be implemented with different requirements on each function. Practical realizations show the trend that to a first order, converter power is directly proportional to sampling rate. However, power dissipation required becomes nonlinear as the speed capabilities of a process technology are pushed to the limit. Pipeline and two-step/multi-step converters tend to be the most efficient at achieving a given resolution and sampling rate specification. This thesis is in a sense unique work as it covers the whole spectrum of design, test, debugging and calibration of multi-step A/D converters; it incorporates development of circuit techniques and algorithms to enhance the resolution and attainable sample rate of an A/D converter and to enhance testing and debugging potential to detect errors dynamically, to isolate and confine faults, and to recover and compensate for the errors continuously. The power proficiency for high resolution of multi-step converter by combining parallelism and calibration and exploiting low-voltage circuit techniques is demonstrated with a 1.8 V, 12-bit, 80 MS/s, 100 mW analog to-digital converter fabricated in five-metal layers 0.18-”m CMOS process. Lower power supply voltages significantly reduce noise margins and increase variations in process, device and design parameters. Consequently, it is steadily more difficult to control the fabrication process precisely enough to maintain uniformity. Microscopic particles present in the manufacturing environment and slight variations in the parameters of manufacturing steps can all lead to the geometrical and electrical properties of an IC to deviate from those generated at the end of the design process. Those defects can cause various types of malfunctioning, depending on the IC topology and the nature of the defect. To relive the burden placed on IC design and manufacturing originated with ever-increasing costs associated with testing and debugging of complex mixed-signal electronic systems, several circuit techniques and algorithms are developed and incorporated in proposed ATPG, DfT and BIST methodologies. Process variation cannot be solved by improving manufacturing tolerances; variability must be reduced by new device technology or managed by design in order for scaling to continue. Similarly, within-die performance variation also imposes new challenges for test methods. With the use of dedicated sensors, which exploit knowledge of the circuit structure and the specific defect mechanisms, the method described in this thesis facilitates early and fast identification of excessive process parameter variation effects. The expectation-maximization algorithm makes the estimation problem more tractable and also yields good estimates of the parameters for small sample sizes. To allow the test guidance with the information obtained through monitoring process variations implemented adjusted support vector machine classifier simultaneously minimize the empirical classification error and maximize the geometric margin. On a positive note, the use of digital enhancing calibration techniques reduces the need for expensive technologies with special fabrication steps. Indeed, the extra cost of digital processing is normally affordable as the use of submicron mixed signal technologies allows for efficient usage of silicon area even for relatively complex algorithms. Employed adaptive filtering algorithm for error estimation offers the small number of operations per iteration and does not require correlation function calculation nor matrix inversions. The presented foreground calibration algorithm does not need any dedicated test signal and does not require a part of the conversion time. It works continuously and with every signal applied to the A/D converter. The feasibility of the method for on-line and off-line debugging and calibration has been verified by experimental measurements from the silicon prototype fabricated in standard single poly, six metal 0.09-”m CMOS process

    SymBIST: Symmetry-based Analog/Mixed-Signal BIST

    Get PDF
    International audienc

    Nonlinear models and algorithms for RF systems digital calibration

    Get PDF
    Focusing on the receiving side of a communication system, the current trend in pushing the digital domain ever more closer to the antenna sets heavy constraints on the accuracy and linearity of the analog front-end and the conversion devices. Moreover, mixed-signal implementations of Systems-on-Chip using nanoscale CMOS processes result in an overall poorer analog performance and a reduced yield. To cope with the impairments of the low performance analog section in this "dirty RF" scenario, two solutions exist: designing more complex analog processing architectures or to identify the errors and correct them in the digital domain using DSP algorithms. In the latter, constraints in the analog circuits' precision can be offloaded to a digital signal processor. This thesis aims at the development of a methodology for the analysis, the modeling and the compensation of the analog impairments arising in different stages of a receiving chain using digital calibration techniques. Both single and multiple channel architectures are addressed exploiting the capability of the calibration algorithm to homogenize all the channels' responses of a multi-channel system in addition to the compensation of nonlinearities in each response. The systems targeted for the application of digital post compensation are a pipeline ADC, a digital-IF sub-sampling receiver and a 4-channel TI-ADC. The research focuses on post distortion methods using nonlinear dynamic models to approximate the post-inverse of the nonlinear system and to correct the distortions arising from static and dynamic errors. Volterra model is used due to its general approximation capabilities for the compensation of nonlinear systems with memory. Digital calibration is applied to a Sample and Hold and to a pipeline ADC simulated in the 45nm process, demonstrating high linearity improvement even with incomplete settling errors enabling the use of faster clock speeds. An extended model based on the baseband Volterra series is proposed and applied to the compensation of a digital-IF sub-sampling receiver. This architecture envisages frequency selectivity carried out at IF by an active band-pass CMOS filter causing in-band and out-of-band nonlinear distortions. The improved performance of the proposed model is demonstrated with circuital simulations of a 10th-order band pass filter, realized using a five-stage Gm-C Biquad cascade, and validated using out-of-sample sinusoidal and QAM signals. The same technique is extended to an array receiver with mismatched channels' responses showing that digital calibration can compensate the loss of directivity and enhance the overall system SFDR. An iterative backward pruning is applied to the Volterra models showing that complexity can be reduced without impacting linearity, obtaining state-of-the-art accuracy/complexity performance. Calibration of Time-Interleaved ADCs, widely used in RF-to-digital wideband receivers, is carried out developing ad hoc models because the steep discontinuities generated by the imperfect canceling of aliasing would require a huge number of terms in a polynomial approximation. A closed-form solution is derived for a 4-channel TI-ADC affected by gain errors and timing skews solving the perfect reconstruction equations. A background calibration technique is presented based on cyclo-stationary filter banks architecture. Convergence speed and accuracy of the recursive algorithm are discussed and complexity reduction techniques are applied
    • 

    corecore