Recent advances in wireless technologies have helped the proliferation of wireless devices, ranging from hand-held devices such as cellular phones to more powerful mobile computing platforms as such laptops [1]. Along with that, the end users’
applications running on these devices, ranging from text message to multimedia applications such as...
In Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) or high frequency digital
ICs, there is a demand to probe the internal nodes for testing. The ultra low
capacitance RFIC probe presented in his work is a flexible tool for these
applications. The probe utilizes the coupling between a tungsten needle and the...
Evolution of the mobile communication standards and proliferation of hand-held devices mandate stringent Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) specifications. Among various ADCs, a ∆Σ ADC is best known as a power-efficient ADC when more than 12b is required. However, a conventional discrete-time (DT) ∆Σ Modulator (∆ΣM) is inadequate for low-power wideband applications...
Advanced low power devices promote the development of micro power generators (MPGs) to replace the batteries to power them. Due to the trend in decreasing integrated circuit (IC) supply voltages, power supply designers are facing more and more serious challenges. The objective of this research is to design a power...
There are five main contributions of this dissertation. The first contribution is new closed-form expressions for channel capacity of a new class of channel matrices. The second contribution is the discovery of the structure for optimal binary quantizer and the associated methods for finding an optimal quantizer that maximizes mutual...
This work focusses on the modeling and the development of efficient coupled simulation techniques for MEMS based RF oscillators. High-level models for MEMS based varactors have been discussed and their accuracy issues are identified, based on comparisons with numerical simulations. A faster simulation approach based on the time-domain shooting method...
This thesis presents two new approaches for the broadband, time-domain modeling of lossy transmission lines. Each approach is based on an alternative derivation of delay extraction in order to separate the line's linear phase from its
attenuation and dispersion. Augmentation networks represent the derived attenuation networks as rational function approximations....
Phase-locked loop (PLL) frequency synthesizers lie at the heart of most radio transceivers. An important objective of the electronics and communications industry is to design high-speed building blocks which dissipate the lowest possible power, and to ac- complish this with the cheapest technology. The dual-modulus prescaler is one of the...
Filters and data converters are key analog-and-mixed-signal (AMS) building blocks in communication systems, such as software-defined radios and internet-of-things. In this dissertation, novel switched-capacitor filter and analog-to-digital converter (ADC) circuit configurations have been explored which are power efficient and are digital scaling friendly.
First, a novel switched-capacitor low-pass filter architecture...
Traditionally, networking protocol designs have placed much emphasis on point-to-point reliability and efficiency. With the recent rise of mobile and multimedia applications, other considerations such as power consumption and/or Quality of Service (QoS) are becoming increasingly important factors in designing network protocols. As such, we present a new flexible framework...