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Spring 2005 Seminars


Dr. Aleksander Dec & Dr. Ken Suyama

Epoch Microelectronics
Date: Friday, March 11, 2005, 2:30pm
Place: 414 CEPSR

Title: Integrated VCOs for Cellular Phone Applications

Abstract:

Recent trend for RF transceivers for high volume market such as cellular phone market is moving toward complete integration of RF front-end circuit and some part of baseband blocks in order to lower the cost of manufacturing. External component count must be lowered. This means that VCOs, loop filters, and many passive elements such as chip capacitors must be integrated.

This presentation illuminates various aspects of integrating VCOs for GSM/DCS cellular phone applications although other applications such as WLANs, tuners, and etc have very similar set of design issues. Publications often emphasize phase noise and power as the main figure of merit. However, there are many other design issues in real product design that make trade-off equations complicated. For example, an integrated VCO often requires (1) wide tuning range for multi-band coverage (triple or quad band for GSM/DCS), (2) Kv (gain of VCO) linearity, (3) low phase noise, (4) low power, (5) low supply pushing, (6) low sensitivity to temperature variations, (7) low sensitivity to process variations for better yield, (8) low noise floor design for output buffers (for TXVCOs used in OPLL), (9) small area (large passives are sin!), and (10) other considerations like pulling and coupling.


Three integrated VCOs (IFVCO, TXVCO, and RFVCO) are presented to show design strategies to address the above mentioned trade-offs.




Dr. Vincent Leung

IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Date: Friday, April 1, 2005, 2:30pm
Place: Interschool Lab (7th Floor CEPSR)

Title: Digital-IF SiGe BiCMOS Transmitter IC for 3G WCDMA Handset Application

Abstract:
  
This talk presents the design and the experimental results of an analog/ RF front-end transmitter IC (TxIC) developed for the next generation (3G) WCDMA mobile phone applications. Implemented in IBM's 0.25um SiGe BiCMOS process, this TxIC chip achieves high integration level and low power consumption through a combination of architecture and circuit innovations.

Based on a digital-IF heterodyne scheme, it eliminates the costly and bulky IF SAW filter by adopting an optimized frequency planning and a special-purpose high-order-hold D/A conversion method. The TxIC features a low-power high-speed DAC designed to drive a dominantly capacitive load. For the up-conversion mixer and the RF amplifier, adaptive biases are designed to minimize the quiescent power consumption and to provide current boost only when needed. The TxIC achieves <1% EVM. It consumes 180mW (3V supply) for the maximum output power of +5dBm, and reduces to 120mW during power backoff.  (This work was conducted at University of California, San Diego, under the joint supervision of Prof. Larry Larson and Dr. Prasad Gudem of Qualcomm.)




Dr. Eduard Sackinger

Conexant
Date: Friday, April 15, 2005, 2:30pm
Place: Interschool Lab (7th Floor CEPSR)

Title: An Integrated CMOS 2.5Gb/s Front-End for SONET Applications.

Abstract:

In the first part of this presentation, I will describe the design and experimental results of a 3GHz, 32dB limiting amplifier in 0.25um CMOS using low voltage-drop active inductors and inversely scaled stages. In the second part, I will describe the design and experimental results of a 2.5Gb/s CMOS receiver chip which combines the above limiting amplifier with a CDR and 1:4 DMUX.



Prof. Ralph Etienne-Cummings
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University

Date: Friday, April 22, 2005, 2:30pm
Place: Interschool Lab (7th Floor CEPSR)
 
Title: Neuromorphic Vision Chips: Bioloigcally Inspired Cameras and Their Application

Abstract:

Embedded image processing on the focal plane promises high image signal quality and fast, compact and low-power information extraction for machine vision applications. Over the past decade, the promise of improved signal quality has been achieved, and we are now able to buy cheap ~60dB CMOS high-resolution imagers. The goal of fast, compact and low-power information extraction is, however, still elusive. Problems with inefficient chip area usage, incompatible algorithms and high power consumption, typically high speed digital, have limited the success on this front.

We have developed a technique that attempts to provide all these promises using digitally programmable analog computation and Computation-On-Readout (COR). Our approach remains compatible with standard computer vision interfaces by preserving the image resolution and scanning format, while in parallel extracting various spatiotemporal features from images. Furthermore, our systems perform greater than 10 GOPS/mW, ~6 bits of resolution, at many thousands of frames per second. Because of the high performance, low-power and compact sizes of these neuromorphic vision chips, they
can be easily used as the visual sensor for mobile robots.




Previous Seminars

Fall 2004 Spring 2004 Fall 2003 Spring 2003 Fall 2002
Spring 2002 Fall 2001 Spring 2001 Fall 2000 Spring 2000

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