Conventional Delta-Sigma analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) utilize operational transconductance amplifiers (OTAs) in their loop filter implementation followed by multi-bit voltage domain quantizers. As CMOS integrated circuit technology scales to smaller geometries, the minimum transistor length and the intrinsic gain of the transistors decrease. Moreover, with process scaling the voltage headroom decreases...
Modern sensor network applications are often implemented wirelessly in order to lessen installation costs and reduce deployment times. Unfortunately, these wireless sensor network (WSN) nodes must often rely on batteries or energy harvesting techniques in order to sustain their operation and supply the power needed to maintain communication within the...
The design of mobile wireless devices has always focused on reducing power, area, and cost. This dissertation proposes two techniques that are leveraged to save power and area and therefore cost. The first techniques reduces the noise in the receiver and results in a relaxed power requirement. The second technique...
For today’s ubiquitous portable devices, innovative integrated circuits with high performance
yet very low power are necessary. As these devices are used to communicate and sense real world signals in the environment, analog-to-digital converters (ADC) and systems are the key interface circuits needed to digitize the sensed information and they...
Wireless sensor networks are becoming important in several monitoring and sensing applications. Ultra low power consumption in the sensor nodes is important for extending the battery life of the nodes. In this dissertation, two low power BFSK receiver architectures are proposed and verified with prototype implementations in silicion.
A 2.4...
This thesis presents a low power DC-DC converter suitable for harvesting energy from high impedance thermoelectric generators (TEGs) for the use in body powered electronics. The chip has been fabricated in a 130nm CMOS technology. To meet the power demands of body powered networks, a novel dual-path architecture capable of...
This thesis presents a low-energy application specific digital controller for a battery-free 2.4 GHz wireless sensor network (WSN) node. The digital controller has been designed and fabricated in a standard 0.13 μm CMOS and implements a simple protocol for WSNs. Techniques such as supply voltage reduction and power gating have...
Efficient methods for simulating the substrate noise generated by complex synchronous and asynchronous digital logic circuits are presented. By simulating digital logic at the gate level, and precharacterizing the gates, the substrate noise generation can be predicted and used in a transistor level simulation of the sensitive analog blocks. This...
Delay insensitive asynchronous circuitry provides significant advantages with
respect to substrate noise due to localized switching. The differences between the
substrate noise from NULL Convention Logic (NCL) and traditional Clocked
Boolean Logic (CBL) are described and analyzed based on measured results. A test chip fabricated in the TSMC 0.25 um...
This thesis presents a Z-parameter based model to predict the substratenoise coupling between two contacts in a heavily doped substrate for frequenciesless than 2 GHz. The empirical model is scalable with contact size and spacingsbetween the contacts and model parameters can be readily extracted from simu-lated or measured data. The...