Digital Assistance for Nanoscale Analog Circuits

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

During the past 40 years, there has been a well-known digital revolution that has made a tremendous impact in how we live, work and play. With digital transistors shrinking as predicted by Moore's law, year over year integrated circuits and systems have continued to become lower in cost, higher in speed and lower in power dissipation for the same computation. What is less well known is that during these 40 years, there has also been an analog revolution that has been critical in improving the performance of electronic systems. These analog integrated circuits serve as the interface between the digital world and the physical world and without performance improvements in the analog circuits, the technology revolution we have seen would not have occurred. A recent review of analog circuit advancements has shown that over the past 10 years, there has been a 60 times improvement in performance. While much of this improvement (10 times) is due to transistors being smaller and faster, a large factor (6 times) has been due to creative circuit innovations which is the focus of this research grant. ******With the above in mind, a number of questions arise. Given a technology node, how close are analog circuits to the best performance achievable? Can we continue to improve analog circuits and how is this best achieved? With the tremendous improvement in digital circuits, can we make use of their decreased size/energy to aid the performance of analog circuits? These questions drive this research in the area of analog integrated circuits.******This research program is driven by the desire to enable analog circuits to be more power efficient and have higher performance when applied to numerous applications such as MEMS interface circuits, RF front-ends, high-speed signaling for serial digital communications and others. The challenge is to develop new circuits, architectures and theory that improve analog circuits and through experimental results, demonstrate the practical advantages that can be obtained.