IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers

A highly-worthy attribute of printed electronics is its possible realization on flexible-substrates that can be molded/bent. Heretofore, investigations into the effects of bending to printed circuit-elements/circuits remain not only largely incomplete, but an electronic/layout-means to mitigate said effects remains unreported/unresolved. We present a comprehensive investigation into the effects of... View full abstract»

Flash memory is an important component in many embedded system-on-a-chip applications, which drives the need to generate high write/erase voltages in generic CMOS processes. In this paper, we present a regulated, high-voltage charge pump for erasing Flash memory and floating-gate transistors. This 0.069-mm2charge pump was fabricated in a 0.35 μm standard CMOS process. While operating fr... View full abstract»

A regulated cross-couple charge pump with new charging current smoothing technique is proposed and verified in a 0.18-μm 1.8-V/3.3-V CMOS process. The transient behaviors of 3-stage cross-couple charge pump and the expressions for the charging current are described in detail. The experiment results show that the charging current ripples are reduced by a factor of three through using the proposed n... View full abstract»

This paper presents a piezoelectric energy harvesting circuit, which integrates a Synchronized Switch Harvesting on Inductor (SSHI) circuit and an active rectifier. The major design challenge of the SSHI method is flipping the capacitor voltage at optimal times. The proposed SSHI circuit inserts an active diode on each resonant loop, which ensures flipping of the capacitor voltage at optimal times... View full abstract»

This integrated receiver channel designed for a pulsed time-of-flight (TOF) laser rangefinder consists of a fully differential transimpedance amplifier channel and a timing discriminator. The amplitude-dependent timing walk error is compensated by measuring the width and rise time of the received pulse echo and using this information for calibration. The measured bandwidth, transimpedance and mini... View full abstract»

This paper presents the design and implementation of a 10-bit ultra-low voltage energy-efficient successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC). The proposed first 2-bit guess (F2G) scheme reduces the DAC switching energy by 90% and improves the DNL and INL by √(3/2) in theory compared with the conventional approach. By employing majority-vote comparison at the conversio... View full abstract»

In this paper, the limitations of digital-to-analog (D/A) conversion by Digital Pulse Width Modulation (DPWM) are addressed and the novel Dyadic Digital Pulse Modulation (DDPM) technique for all-digital, low cost, high resolution, Nyquist-rate D/A conversion is proposed. Thanks to the spectral characteristics of the new modulation, in particular, the requirements of the filter needed to extract th... View full abstract»

In this paper, conditions for checking the realizability of fractional-order impedance functions by passive networks composed of a fractional element (either a fractional capacitor or a fractional inductor) and some RLC components are derived. To this end, at first the newly obtained conditions for realizability of fractional-order impedance functions by a passive network composed of a fractional ... View full abstract»

Nonvolatile processor (NVP) attracts more and more attentions for its immunity to power loss in energy harvesting scenarios. The overall performance of an NVP is determined by its sleep and wake-up speeds, which refer to how fast the NVP can turn itself off and on when a sudden power failure occurs. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first work to improve the system-level sleep/wake-u... View full abstract»

In this paper, an 8X-parallelism all-digital baseband receiver is proposed to support SC and OFDM modes for both IEEE 802.15.3c and IEEE 802.11ad standards. The all-digital baseband receiver contains a 4-in-1 synchronization (SYNC), a 512-point radix-2³ IFFT/FFT, a phase noise cancellation (PNC), a shared memory (MEM) bank and a frequency-domain equalizer (FDE) with an optim... View full abstract»

This paper investigates the event-triggering containment control of multi-agent networks with fixed and switching topologies, where there exist interactions between the leaders. Two cases are studied, respectively: One is that the leaders are opinionated. Then each leader will converge to its initial goal and the followers converge to the convex hull formed by the leaders. The other is that the le... View full abstract»

A constant on time variable frequency one-cycle control technique (CVFOCC) for switched-capacitor (SC) converters is presented in this paper. It is designed to accomplish the continuous variable conversion ratio and fast dynamical response to reject the external disturbance. A proper regulation can be obtained by controlling the related “off time” of a transistor with the constant “on time” which ... View full abstract»

A 4-element 60-GHz phased-array receiver RF front-end (RFE) employing LO-path phase-shifting configuration is presented. A wide bandwidth from 57 to 66 GHz is achieved by using multiple design techniques, including wide-band input matching network using on-chip baluns, peak-frequency staggering in the LNAs, and resonant-frequency tuning of the LC load in the first down-conversion stages. Furthermo... View full abstract»

A fully integrated optical-to-wireless modulator for low-cost fiber-optical backhaul links is presented in this paper. In the receiver, a CMOS photodetector with a bandwidth of 0.5 GHz is integrated to perform optical-to-electrical conversion. A gain-boosted inverter based transimpedance amplifier achieves a high gain-bandwidth product without using inductive peaking. The two-stage equalizer compe... View full abstract»

This paper describes a 28-Gb/s receiver IC with self-contained adaptive equalization and sampling point control using an on-chip stochastic sigma-tracking eye-opening monitor (SSEOM). The proposed SSEOM accurately detects the bit-error-rate (BER)-related eye contour efficiently without the use of an external microcontroller. The SSEOM determines the BER-optimal sampling point and equalizer coeffic... View full abstract»

Future hyper-connected devices must support several communication standards, across various frequency bands, with a low-area, single-chip, radio frequency frontend. In this paper, we present a reconfigurable, inductorless, wide-band, low-noise amplifier (LNA) for multistandard applications. This LNA is based on a complementary current-reuse common source amplifier, combined with a low-current acti... View full abstract»

In ultra-wideband impulse radio communications, process, voltage, and temperature variations may impact the operation of emitters by modifying the emitted power spectral density. In order to compensate the impact of such variations and to respect the spectral emission masks, self-calibration systems able to estimate the output power spectral density have to be integrated in ultra-wideband impulse ... View full abstract»

This paper presents an all-digital transmitter solution particularly suited for Massive multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) systems for mobile communications. Massive MIMO is a key candidate to address the challenges of future mobile communication standards, especially to provide higher capacity in dense urban scenarios. While the required communication theory is elaborated to a great extend... View full abstract»

This paper presents a new method for detecting and reversing the polarity of a low-voltage thermoelectric generator (TEG) in inductor-based converters. The proposed technique makes use of the inductor response to a voltage change due to the flip in the TEG polarity. The inductor voltage provides two distinguishable states which correspond to the normal and the reversed TEG polarity. A switch matri... View full abstract»

A circuit-oriented geometrical approach in predicting subharmonic oscillation (SHO) of voltage-mode switching converters is presented. It is based on a straightforward graphical analysis of the operation of the converter without using advanced mathematical techniques. It is shown that the slope of the output of the compensator at the trip point is an important factor in determining the onset of SH... View full abstract»

In this work, a novel rectifier based on a branch-line coupler is proposed to operate within wide ranges of input power, operating frequency and output load. In the proposed topology, two output ports of the coupler are connected with two identical sub-rectifiers and the isolation port is directly connected to the ground. The input impedance of the two sub-rectifiers varies with different input po... View full abstract»

Models of inverters and other converters based on averaging have been widely used in numerous simulation applications. Generalized averaging can be applied to model both average and switching behavior of converters while retaining the faster run times associated with average-value models. Herein, generalized average models for single- and three-phase pulse width modulation inverters are proposed. ... View full abstract»