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...
Continuous process scale-down and emerging markets for low-power/low-voltage mobile systems call for low-voltage analog integrated circuits. Switched-capacitor circuits are the building blocks for analog signal processing and will encounter severe overdrive problems when operating at low-voltage conditions. There are several well-known techniques to bypass the problem. These approaches include: (1)...
Desire for low-power, high performance computing has been at core of the symbiotic union between digital circuits and CMOS scaling. While digital circuit performance improves with device scaling, analog circuits have not gained these benefits. As a result, it has become necessary to leverage increased digital circuit performance to mitigate...
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...
The demand for portable electronic systems and the continued
down-scaling of device dimensions resulted in rapid improvement in
the performance of integrated systems. Several low-voltage design
techniques have been proposed to operate analog circuits with sub-1V
supply. However, these techniques require higher power consumption
to achieve large dynamic range while...
This dissertation presents a low-power high-resolution delta-sigma ADC. Two new architectural design techniques are proposed to reduce the power dissipation of the ADC. Compared to the conventional active adder, the direct charge transfer (DCT) adder greatly saves power by keeping the feedback factor of the active adder unity. However, the...
This work presents improvements to a multi-core performance/power simulator. The improvements which include updated power models, voltage scaling aware models, and an application specific benchmark, are done to increase the accuracy of power models under voltage and frequency scaling. Improvements to the simulator enable more accurate design space exploration for...
The release of the IEEE802.15.6 standard has led to increased interest in low-power technologies for wireless body-area-networks (WBANs). The power dissipation, supply voltage, and die area are some of the most important criteria for successful WBAN implementations. Digital-intensive RX architectures can potentially result in sub-1V operation with significant reductions in...
Energy consumption is one of the primary bottlenecks to both large and small scale modern compute platforms. Reducing the operating voltage of digital circuits to voltages where the supply voltage is near or below the threshold of the transistors has recently gained attention as a method to reduce the energy...