The purpose of the thesis is to design, construct,
program, and test an automatic integrated circuit test
system. The class of integrated circuits tested was restricted
to digital integrated circuits. The general concept
of testing a digital integrated circuit is based on
the truth table of that circuit. A combination...
The object of this work was to design and fabricate an integrated circuit using Integrated Injection Logic. Integrated Injection Logic (I[superscript 2] L) is a relatively new field and has many inherent advantages. These have been exploited in this work. Logic for the desired functions was designed and implemented in...
A digital phase locked loop (DPLL) and a statistical time-to-digital converter (STDC) were previously fabricated in a 0.35µm, 3.3V SOI CMOS process. This work summarizes these designs and characterizes the measured performance. Simulations supplement the measurements where applicable.
The DPLL was found to reach a locked state under a limited...
A short-circuit-protected line-driver circuit is
particularly adapted for use in a CMOS differential line-driver
system, where one line-driver circuit provides a
true output signal, and another line-driver circuit
provides a complementary false output signal. A short-circuit
is sensed by measuring current through a secondary
pull-up transistor, and disabling a primary...
The electrical performance of on-chip interconnects has become a limiting factor to the performance of modern integrated circuits including RFICs, mixed-signal circuits, as well as high-speed VLSI circuits due to increasing operating frequencies, chip areas, and integration densities. It is advantageous to have fast and accurate closed-form expressions for the...
The electrical behavior of on-chip interconnects has become a dominant factor in silicon-based high speed, RF, and mixed-signal integrated circuits. In particular, the frequency-dependent loss mechanisms in heavily-doped silicon substrates can have a large influence on the transmission characteristics of on-chip interconnects. To optimize the performance of the integrated circuit,...
Asynchronous circuits have recently been a breakthrough in many high performance computers. The concept of asynchronous circuits which started a long time ago has slowly grasped the attention of many designers. The Muller-C-element is an important control block in many asynchronous designs and therefore it is important to understand some...
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...
The purpose of this study is to develop experimental techniques to
characterize typical interconnect discontinuities, including bends, steps, T
junctions, vias and pads, which are the most commonly encountered
interconnections in high speed digital integrated circuits, hybrid and
monolithic microwave circuits and electronic packages. The time domain
reflection response of...