VLSI Design on Software Radio for multi-standard and wireless sensor application

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This is an improved proposal, based on the "message to applicant" and "referee reports" to the applicant's last year Discovery Grant application (application no. 2014-04791). The proposed research focuses on the VLSI design for multi-standard software radio and takes advantage of Moore’s law in scaling of CMOS technology. Applications towards wireless sensor, while incorporating wireless encryption and authentication in radio (via design of true random number generator) will be pursued. These applications are found in the concept of  internet of things. To handle multi-standard,  the idea of software radio is to digitize the incoming signal in a receiver as soon as possible while staying digital as long as possible for the outgoing signal in a transmitter, so that digital signal processing/software techniques can be used to perform much of the data processing and allow flexibility.  Towards this end, the efficient design of mixed analog/digital circuits, such as analog/digital converter, remain the key bottleneck. Meanwhile application such as wireless sensor focuses on low energy. Therefore main challenges in this proposal include designing circuit as voltage supply and power/energy consumption is reduced. Techniques that overcome such challenges, as well as taking advantage of increased speed offered by constant scaling in CMOS technology will be explored. Specifically circuit techniques that are time based (can operate under reduced supply voltage and is energy efficient), such as the use of time based sigma-delta modulators will be investigated. Time based voltage control oscillators, such as ring oscillator, relaxation oscillator, and time resolution improvement circuits, such as phase interpolator, will be explored. This will be based on the applicant's unique experience, in sigma delta modulator design, and in phase noise/timing jitter model. These time based circuits are key building blocks in software radio transceiver and wireless sensor such as time to digital converters, time based A/D converter, lowpass/bandpass sigma-delta modulators, fractional-N frequency synthesizers. In addition, time based true random number generators employing ring and relaxation oscillators will be designed. This includes the use of relaxation oscillator and low slew rate ring oscillator, both generating exceptionally large amount of noise/randomness and can tackle security issues for wireless application, such as encryption and authentication codes generation. In summary the time based technique will be used throughout this proposal in the VLSI design of software radio.