IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits

This paper describes a CMOS capacitive sensing amplifier for a monolithic MEMS accelerometer fabricated by post-CMOS surface micromachining. This chopper stabilized amplifier employs capacitance matching with optimal transistor sizing to minimize sensor noise floor. Offsets due to sensor and circuit are reduced by ac offset calibration and dc offset cancellation based on a differential difference ... View full abstract»

A 6.5-GHz FSK modulator suitable for low power wireless sensor network is presented. The energy efficient modulator employs closed-loop direct VCO modulation to achieve high data rate, multistage variable loop bandwidth technique for fast startup time and Σ-Δ for reduced power consumption in the synthesizer with fine resolution in frequency channel selection. The modulator, implemented... View full abstract»

A design technique for an over-10-Gb/s clock and data recovery (CDR) IC provides good jitter tolerance and low jitter. To design the CDR using a PLL that includes a decision circuit with a certain phase margin affecting the pull-in performance, we derived a simple expression for the pull-in range of the PLL, which we call the "limited pull-in range," and used it for the pull-in performance evaluat... View full abstract»

A fully integrated digitally controlled phase-locked loop (PLL) used as a clock multiplying circuit is designed and fabricated. The PLL has no off-chip components and it is made from standard cells found in most digital standard cell libraries. The design is, therefore, portable between technologies as an IP block. Using a 0.35-μm standard CMOS process and a 3.0-V supply voltage, the PLL has a ... View full abstract»

An 800-MHz low-power direct digital frequency synthesizer (DDFS) with an on-chip digital-to-analog (D/A) converter is presented. The DDFS consists of a phase accumulator, two phase-to-sine converters, and a D/A converter. The high-speed operation of the DDFS is enabled by applying parallelism to the phase-to-sine converter and by including a D/A converter in a single chip. The on-chip D/A converte... View full abstract»

This paper presents a physical derivation of phase noise in source-coupled-logic frequency dividers. This analysis takes into account both white and flicker noise sources and is verified on two 32/33 dual-modulus prescalers integrated in a 0.35-μm CMOS process. Design techniques for high-speed and low-noise operation are provided. The two integrated prescalers are identical apart from a synchro... View full abstract»

In this paper, architecture and circuit design of a beamforming baseband receiver IC for uplink W-CDMA communication systems is presented. In the proposed receiver, a four-antenna-element beamformer and a four-finger RAKE combiner are adopted to exploit both spatial diversity and path diversity receiving. To minimize the size and power consumption of the receiver, a latch-based 1024-tap complex de... View full abstract»

A quad-channel 0.6-3.2 Gb/s/channnel transceiver using eight independent phase-locked loops (PLLs) shows a 1-ps rms random jitter performance without interchannel interference. The PLL employs a folded starved inverter with high supply/substrate noise immunity and an analog coarse-tuning scheme for both seamless frequency acquisition and N-fold voltage-controlled-oscillator (VCO) gain reduction. A... View full abstract»

A low-cost wrapper-based bus implementation is described that performs well in system-on-chip (SOC) designs. Novel wrapper implementation techniques are used to create wrappers without embedded data buffers. The bus uses 1) a novel slave wrapper interface that supports flow control signals, 2) a write buffer switching technique for the master wrappers to achieve good performance at a small hardwar... View full abstract»

Multithreshold CMOS (MTCMOS) circuits reduce standby leakage power with low delay overhead. Most MTCMOS designs cut off the power to large blocks of logic using large sleep transistors. Locally distributing sleep devices has remained less popular even though it has several advantages described in this paper. However, locally placed sleep devices are only feasible if sneak leakage currents are prev... View full abstract»

This paper describes an investigation of cosmic-ray-induced multicell error behavior in SRAMs. A combination of device- and circuit-level simulation was used to show that a parasitic bipolar effect is responsible for such errors, and the underlying mechanism is what we call a battery effect. We have also demonstrated, for the first time, that the maximum number of cell errors per cosmic-ray strike... View full abstract»

A low voltage-power, 13-bit and 16 MSPS analog-to-digital converter (ADC) was implemented in 0.25-μm one-poly five-metal standard CMOS process with MIM capacitors. This ADC used a constant-gm switch to improve the nonlinear effect and a telescopic operational transconductance amplifier with a wide-swing biasing technique for power saving and low supply voltage operation. The converter achieved ... View full abstract»

The resolution of a comparator is determined by the dc input offset and the ac noise. For mixed-mode applications with significant digital switching, input-referred supply noise can be a significant source of error. This paper proposes an offset compensation technique that can simultaneously minimize input-referred supply noise. Demonstrated with digital offset compensation, this scheme reduces in... View full abstract»

The design of a low-voltage 40-GHz complementary voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) with 15% frequency tuning range fabricated in 0.13-μm partially depleted silicon-on-insulator (SOI) CMOS technology is reported. Technological advantages of SOI over bulk CMOS are demonstrated, and the accumulation MOS (AMOS) varactor limitations on frequency tuning range are addressed. At 1.5-V supply, the VCO... View full abstract»

This paper describes a 14-b direct digital frequency synthesizer (DDFS) utilizing a sigma-delta noise shaping technique to reduce spurs arising from phase truncation. A new phase accumulator architecture adopting a second-order sigma-delta modulator is proposed. The sigma-delta noise shaping eliminates periodicity inherent in the phase truncation error. With the proposed phase accumulator, the sig... View full abstract»

This paper presents a low-power ASIC design for cell search in the wideband code-division multiple-access (W-CDMA) system. A low-complexity algorithm that is able to work satisfactorily under the effect of large frequency and clock errors is designed first. Then, a set of low-power measures are employed in the design of hardware architecture and circuits. Finally, through power analysis, critical ... View full abstract»