IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems

Biosensors have been applied to disparate fields, especially for endogenous compounds such as glucose and lactate. The main areas of application are certainly related to medical and diagnostic purposes. However, metabolic monitoring can be also of interest in cell analysis. Cells can be cultivated for several purposes, such as understanding and modeling some biological mechanisms, the development ... View full abstract»

In this paper, we present a heterogeneous integration platform for bio-sensing applications, which seamlessly integrates low-power silicon-based circuits with cost-effective printed electronics. A prototype of wearable Bio-Sensing Node is fabricated to investigate the suitability of this integration approach. A 1.5 ×3.0 mm2 customized mixed-signal system-on-chip (SoC) with the si... View full abstract»

This paper presents a low-power optically powered receiver system designed in 0.18 μm triple well UMC complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Optical transmission is used for both power delivery and signal transmission. The power of the whole system can be supplied in two different configurations, namely continuous and intermittent mode configurations. In the continuous m... View full abstract»

Three primary techniques for manufacturing through silicon vias (TSVs), via-first, via-middle, and via-last, have been analyzed and compared to distribute power in a 3-D processor-memory system with nine planes. Due to distinct fabrication techniques, these TSV technologies require significantly different design constraints, as investigated in this paper. A valid design space that satisfies the pe... View full abstract»

The performance of an integrated circuit depends strongly upon the power delivery system. With the introduction of ultra-small on-chip voltage regulators, novel design methodologies are needed to simultaneously determine the location of the on-chip power supplies and decoupling capacitors. In this paper, a unified design methodology is proposed to determine the optimal location of the power suppli... View full abstract»

3-D sequential integration stands out from other 3-D schemes as it enables the full use of the third dimension. Indeed, in this approach, 3-D contact density matches with the transistor scale. In this paper, we report on the main advances enabling the demonstration of functional and performant stacked CMOS-FETs; i.e., wafer bonding, low temperature processes (<;650°C) and salicide stabil... View full abstract»

This paper reports a multi-layered smart image sensor architecture for feature extraction based on detection of interest points. The architecture is conceived for 3-D integrated circuit technologies consisting of two layers (tiers) plus memory. The top tier includes sensing and processing circuitry aimed to perform Gaussian filtering and generate Gaussian pyramids in fully concurrent way. The circ... View full abstract»