Sharif Digital Repository

While the transistor density continues to grow exponentially in Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), the increased leakage current of CMOS transistors act as a power wall for the aggressive integration of transistors in a single die. One recently trend to alleviate the power wall in FPGAs is to turn off inactive regions of the silicon die, referred to as dark silicon. This paper presents a reconfigurable architecture to enable effective fine-grained power gating of unused Logic Blocks (LBs) in FPGAs. In the proposed architecture, the traditional soft logic is replaced with Mega Cells (MCs), each consists of a set of complementary Generic Reconfigurable Hard Logic (GRHL) and a conventional... 

This paper reports on design and measurement results of a state of the art low-noise and high-gain transimpedance amplifier (TIA) implemented in 0.18 μm TSMC CMOS technology. Thorough design methodology for high gain and low power TIA design for 2.5 Gb/s optical communication circuits family is presented. A noiseless capacitive feedback is proposed and implemented as a noise efficient feedback network for TIA circuits. Besides, analytical noise calculations in this family of TIA circuits are presented and optimum noise criteria are derived. The saturation and instability problem of TIA circuits resulted from DC dark current of the input photodiodes (PDs) is addressed and a circuit level... 

This paper describes a new capacitor sharing technique for pipeline ADCs. It enables power reduction of the first and second MDACs simultaneously. The presented noise and power analysis shows that the proposed method is about 30% more efficient than the conventional one in terms of the first and second MDACs power dissipation. A 10-bit 40MS/s pipeline ADC employing the proposed technique was designed in 90-nm CMOS technology achieving a power consumption of 4.2 mW  

The analysis and design of a tunable low noise active inductor is presented. The noise performance of the proposed gyrator-based active inductor is improved without either degrading its quality factor or consuming more power using a linear Feed Forward Path (FFP). The proposed low noise active inductor has been designed and fabricated using standard 0.18-μm CMOS technology. The measurements show a 3 fold improvement in the input noise current compared to that of conventional active inductors. The active inductor was tuned and measured at the resonance frequency of 2.5 GHz, which could be extended as high as 5.5 GHz, with a quality factor of 30. The circuit draws 4.8 mA from a 1.8 V supply  

This paper presents closed loop simulation of a CMOS-MEMS force sensor for biomedical applications employing an optimal proportional-integral-derivative controller. Since the dynamic behavior of the sensor under investigation is nonlinear the iterative feedback tuning approach was proposed for optimal gains tuning of the proposed controller. Simulation results presented in this research illustrate that the proposed controller suppresses the undesired in-plane vibration induced by environment or gripper 40 times faster than the nonlinear controller proposed in the literature. To suppress the maximum input disturbance the maximum voltage was approximately 18 V which was less than the pull-in... 

A method to design a tunable low noise amplifier (LNA) for multiband receivers is proposed. This paper also presents a single-ended to differential conversion (S2DC) topology which improves the LNA linearity without degrading its noise performance. Combining input tuning with S2DC in a single stage reduces power consumption of the LNA and decreases effects of supply noise. An LNA has been designed based on the proposed method for 2.3-4.8 GHz in a 0.18 μm CMOS technology. Simulations show an IIP3 of -3.2 dBm, a less than 3.7 dB noise figure (NF), a voltage gain of 24 dB in the whole frequency range. The LNA draws 13.1 mW from a 1.8 V supply. The results indicate that the proposed tuning... 

A dual-mode power and performance optimized SRAM is presented. Given the fact that the power and speed associated with the cell access time are directly related to the sense amplifier offset a new optimization platform based on the hybrid offset-cancelled current sense amplifier (OCCSA) [1] is presented. It is shown that the speed and power overhead of the offset cancellation can be optimized in a multi-variable auto-calibration loop to achieve the lowest power or the highest performance mode. The flexibility of having two degrees of freedom in OCCSA offers a significant bitline delay reduction with minimum power sacrifice in the high performance mode. The proposed scheme is verified using a... 

This paper presents a general method for real-time adaptation of wireless receivers according to the prevailing reception conditions. In order to maintain the desired signal quality at the minimum possible power dissipation, the method performs an optimal trade-off between noise, linearity, and power consumption in the building blocks of the receiver. This is achieved by continuously monitoring the signal-to-noise plus interference ratio (SNIR) and accordingly tuning the adaptation parameters embedded in the receiver design. A prototype DVB-H receiver chip, implemented in a standard 0.18-μ m CMOS process, is used as the test vehicle. By properly trading noise with linearity in the receiver,... 

A new ultra wideband (UWB) pulse generator covering a-10 dB bandwidth of 2.4-4.6 GHz with a tunable center frequency of 5-5.6 GHz to mitigate coexistence issues of impulse radio UWB (IR-UWB) systems and IEEE802.11.a WLAN or other narrowband (NB) systems in 90 nm-CMOS technology is proposed. The UWB pulse is generated based on frequency up-conversion of the first derivative of the Gaussian pulse, which creates an adjustable null in the frequency spectrum. Simulation results show that employing the proposed pulse generator mitigates the mutual interference between UWB and WLAN systems, significantly. The proposed transmitter consists of a low frequency signal generator, an LC oscillator and a... 

This brief introduces a differential eight-transistor static random access memory (SRAM) cell for subthreshold SRAM applications. The symmetric topology offers a smaller area overhead compared with other symmetric cells for the same stability in the read operation. Two transistors isolate the cell storage nodes from the read operation path to maintain the data stability of the cell. This topology improves the data stability at the expense of read operation delay. Thorough postlayout Monte Carlo worst corner simulations in 45-nm CMOS technology are conducted. The proposed cell operates down to 0.35 V with a read noise margin of 74 mV and a write noise margin of 92 mV. Under this condition,... 

This paper presents a low power SAR ADC utilizing pipelining to increase the resolution up to 12 bits while maintaining a high speed sampling rate. Novel system level modifications and also new comparator architecture are proposed to optimize the power consumption. The ADC is designed and simulated in 0.18um CMOS technology by 1.2v supply voltage consuming 4.5mW power at 40MS/s sampling rate. The results indicates an effective number of bits (ENOB) of 11.04 bit and a challenging FOM of 54.9 fj/conversion which verifies the competence of proposed method  

A low power 4-bit flash ADC is proposed. A new power reduction technique is employed which deactivates the unused blocks in the converter structure in order to reduce the power consumption. A new method for built-in threshold voltage generation together with a new offset calibration method is used to further reduce the power consumption in the converter. Monte-Carlo simulation shows that after calibration both the INL and the DNL are lower than 0.35 LSB. The converter achieves 3.5 effective number of bits (ENOB) at 1.2 GS/s sampling rate after the offset calibration is performed. It consumes 10 mW from a 1.8 V supply, yielding a FoM of 560 fJ/conversion.step in a 0.18 μm standard CMOS... 

In this paper, a novel multiple antenna, high-resolution eigenvalue-based spectrum sensing algorithm based on the FFT of the received signal is introduced. The proposed platform overcomes the SNR wall problem in the conventional energy detection (ED) algorithm, enabling the detection of the weak signals at -10 dB SNR. Moreover, the utilization of FFT for the input signal channelization provides a simple, low-power design for a high-resolution spectrum sensing regime. A real-time, low-area, and low-power VLSI architecture is also developed for the algorithm, which is implemented in a 0.18 μm CMOS technology. The implemented design is the first eigenvalue-based detection (EBD) architecture... 

Speaker adaptive speech synthesis based on Hidden Semi-Markov Model (HSMM) has been demonstrated to be dramatically effective in the presence of confined amount of speech data. However, we could intensify this effectiveness by training the average voice model appropriately. Hence, this study presents a new method for training the average voice model. This method guarantees that data from every speaker contributes to all the leaves of decision tree. We considered this fact that small training data and highly diverse contexts of training speakers are considered as disadvantages which degrade the quality of average voice model impressively, and further influence the adapted model and synthetic... 

Long Term Evolution (LTE) supports peak data rates in excess of 300 Mb/s. A good approach to achieve such rates is by parallelizing the required processing in turbo decoders. An interleaver is an important part of a turbo decoder. LTE uses the Quadratic Permutation Polynomial (QPP) interleaver, which makes it suitable for parallel decoding. In this paper, we propose an efficient architecture for the QPP interleaver, called the Add-Compare-Select (ACS) permuting network. A unique feature of the proposed architecture is that it can be used both as the interleaver and deinterleaver leading to a high-speed low-complexity hardware interleaver/deinterleaver for turbo decoding. The proposed design... 

As technology scales the area constraint is becoming less restrictive, but soft error rate and leakage current are drastically increased with technology down scaling. Therefore, in nano-scaled CMOS technology, the reduction of soft error rate and leakage current is the most important challenge in designing field programmable gate arrays (FPGA). To overcome these difficulties, based on the observations that most configuration bit-streams of FPGA are zeros across different designs and that configuration memory cells are not directly involved with signal propagation delays in FPGA, this paper presents a new family of configuration memory cells for FPGAs in nano-scaled CMOS technology. When... 

A single chip UHF-RFID transceiver front-end is presented. The chip was designed according to EPCglobal Class-1 Gen-2 and supports both ETSI and FCC requirements. The receiver front end is capable of rejecting self-jammers as large as 10 dBm with the aid of a feedback loop. The stability and the robustness of the loop and other system requirements are studied. A 30 dBm class-AB power amplifier (PA) with 28% PAE is also integrated on the chip. The pseudo differential architecture of the PA greatly reduces the injection of the signal into the substrate. A simple model is used to estimate the effect of the substrate noise injection by the PA on the receiving circuit modules and design guides... 

With the emerging nanoscale CMOS technology, Multiple Event Transients (METs) originated from radiation strikes are expected to become more frequent than Single Event Transients (SETs). In this paper, a fast and accurate layout- based Soft Error Rate (SER) estimation technique with consideration of both SET and MET fault models is pro- posed. Unlike previous techniques in which the adjacent MET sites are obtained from logic-level netlist, we perform a comprehensive layout analysis to extract MET adjacent cells. It is shown that layout-based technique is the only effective solution for identification of adjacent cells as netlist-based techniques significantly underestimate the overall SER.... 

A high-Q, tunable, bandpass filtered amplifier structure is proposed which is based on a novel Q enhancement technique in N-path filters. Using Fourier series analysis, frequency response of an N-path filter as well as the aliasing effects which are present in it are derived. Frequency translation of unwanted contents at higher frequencies to the center frequency of the bandpass filter is called harmonic fold back (HFB). It is shown that using an additional N-path filter with the same clock frequency but different clock phases can reduce the HFB. The required conditions for fold back elimination are derived fromFourier series expansion analysis. In order to achieve HFB reduction as well as... 

A novel detection algorithm with an efficient VLSI architecture featuring efficient operation over infinite complex lattices is proposed. The proposed design results in the highest throughput, the lowest latency, and the lowest energy compared to the complex-domain VLSI implementations to date. The main innovations are a novel complex-domain means of expanding/visiting the intermediate nodes of the search tree on demand, rather than exhaustively, as well as a new distributed sorting scheme to keep track of the best candidates at each search phase. Its support of unbounded infinite lattice decoding distinguishes the present method from previous K-Best strategies and also allows its complexity...