The prevalence of Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications leads to an increasing focus on the design and optimization of sensor nodes. Battery lifetime and associated costs of battery replacement often limits the long term operation and viability of sensor nodes. RF wireless energy harvesting on the other hand can be appealing since...
Substrate switching noise is becoming a concern as integrated circuits get larger and speeds get faster. Mixed-mode integrated circuits are especially affected as the substrate noise interferes with sensitive analog circuits resulting in limited signal to noise ratios. This thesis serves to study the cause of the noise at the...
This thesis presents an automated methodology to calibrate the substrate profile for accurate prediction of substrate parasitics using Green's function based extractors. The technique requires fabrication of only a few test structures and results in an accurate three layered approximation of a heavily doped epitaxial silicon substrate. The obtained substrate...
The ability to integrate designs from board level, multi-chip modules to single process solutions is highly attractive in today's PC multimedia industry. Saving board area and chip count will decrease the production cost of personal computing hardware and increase profitability. The ability to integrate analog circuit capability and it's reference...
High-accuracy and high-speed CMOS track-and-hold (T/H) or sample-and-hold (S/H) circuits are an important part of the analog-to-digital interface. The switched-capacitor (SC) circuits usually contain one or more op-amps whose dc offset, finite gain, finite bandwidth have a big impact on the accuracy of the track-and-hold circuit. Basic correlated double sampling...
Currently, the two most critical factors of microprocessor design are performance and power. The optimum balance of these two factors is reflected in the speed-power product(SPP). 32-bit CMOS adders are used as representative circuits to investigate a method of
reducing the SPP. The purpose of this thesis is to show...
Dynamic CMOS circuits are commonly used in high-performance memory arrays to implement wide-NOR logic functions for their read and search operations. This is because dynamic circuits have significantly higher speed and lower area compared to static circuits for performing similar operations. Register File (RF) arrays are located at the top...
Advances in process technologies have led to the development of low-power high speed digital signal processing blocks that occupy small areas. These advances are critical in the development of portable electronic devices with small feature size and long battery life. However, the design of analog and mixed-signal
building blocks, especially...
Recent trends in CMOS technology and scaling of devices clearly indicate that leakage power in digital circuits would be crucial and largely depend on the sub-threshold current.
Minimizing leakage is gaining increasing importance along with other critical design aspects primarily due to the growing demand for portable battery-operated electronic devices...
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...
All-digital PLLs promise flexible and precise frequency modulation continous-wave(FMCW) radar signal signal for 77GHz radar applications. Such PLLs require digitally-controlled oscillators(DCO) with wide frequency tuning range and high resolution to address a range of applications and low phase noise requirements. In this thesis, novel resonator structures with ne capacitance/inductance switching...
This thesis will discuss two critical components of a digital system -- domino logic styles and flip-flops. In today's microprocessors, both domino logic and flip-flops are essential to high-performance and low-power design. Two new domino logic styles are presented and analyzed, Double Edge Triggered (DET) and Double Data Rate (DDR)...
In this thesis, novel design techniques have been proposed for implementing high-linearity SC circuits in a standard digital CMOS process. They use nonlinear MOSFET capacitors instead of linear double-poly capacitors. To reduce their nonlinearities, a bias voltage is applied to keep MOSFET capacitors in their accumulation regions. For further reduction...
Clock-feedthrough effects, channel-length modulation and device mismatch are
the main causes of the inaccuracy of Switched-Current (SI) circuits. In this paper, these
non-ideal effects are analyzed. A high-performance current mirror, namely regulated
cascode current mirror, which eliminates drain voltage variation problem is introduced.
By using this current mirror as a...
A negatively biased substrate has several advantages over a grounded substrate in CMOS
technology. The on-chip generation of this negative substrate bias has made chips easier
to use when only a single supply is preferred. This project demonstrates two types of
charge pump circuits used to generate negative voltages not...
With increasing interest in current-mode analogue processing due to its high
performance properties such as speed, bandwidth and accuracy compared to voltage-mode
processing, new current-mode alternatives to various conventional circuit designs are
appearing. In this report, a novel circuit design to construct a fully-differential current-mode
operational amplifier ( OP-AMP )...
For the past half century, CMOS process scaling has followed Moore's law, approximately doubling transistor density every 18 months. While locally routed wires have generally scaled with transistor size, longer wires have scaled at a slower rate and in some cases have grown larger as chip size and complexity have...
Modern day CMOS processes are characterized by voltage scaling and geometry scaling. Geometry scaling helps reduce gate delays, thereby aiding in the design of data converters which use time based processing. Another artifact of geometry scaling is the increase in complexity of digital circuitry available on traditional analog ICs, as...
The parasitic components of MOS switches at high speeds affect the linearity and resolution of CMOS sample and hold circuits. CCD-based circuit design can offer good performance at high speeds. This thesis presents the design of sample and hold circuits using charge-coupled device structures in a standard CMOS process. Three...