Sharif Digital Repository

ADC is one of the key functional blocks of any mixed signal system and therefore must be optimally designed concerning power, performance, resolution and silicon area. Among different architectures have been employed up to now, successive approximation register ADCs are known as the ones with lower power, more simplicity and lower sampling rate. Benefiting from scaling down the CMOS technology results in higher sampling rate and lower power SAR ADCs replacing other types of ADCs. To achieve the desired ADC performance, efforts are usually focused on the improvement of circuit techniques as well as on the introduction of new or combinational architectures based on SAR ADCs. This thesis aims... 

A novel low noise quadrature voltage-controlled oscillator (QVCO) with differential N-path filter is proposed in 0.18-μm CMOS technology. The said QVCO benefits from a cross-coupled structure and a current-reuse technology to produce the quadrature signal and to save power consumption and area, respectively. The new architecture reduces the phase noise by 8dBc/Hz at a 1MHz offset frequency for 2.4GHz oscillation frequency. QVCO consumes 9.8mW from 1.8V power supply when operating at 2.4GHz. QVCO has a frequency tuning range from 2.4GHz to 3GHz and achieves a FOM of 191dB at 1MHz offset. Switches of N-path filter are controlled by outputs of QVCO, so the center frequency of N-path filter is... 

The number of connected devices through the internet of things is increasing rapidly, which leads to adopting different communication technologies to provide connectivity of this large number of devices. The used communication technologies can be classified into the local area network, low-power wide-area network (LPWAN), and cellular network technologies. The receiver power has a critical role in the total power consumption of utilized transceiver chips in these technologies. Radiofrequency (RF) front-ends are often significant power-consuming parts of integrated receivers. Therefore, system-level design in which the overall specifications are distributed among RF front-end building blocks... 

In this thesis designing of analog integrated circuits of contactless smart card in 0.18 um CMOS technology has been done according to the defined specifications in the related standard. This design includes two main parts which consist of power supplying blocks and data extracting blocks. Also for designing and simulating analog section circuits a suitable model of wireless interface between card and reader is needed which is obtained by some measurements on a specific card and reader. Power supplying blocks consist ofrectifier, regulator and the reference voltage and current generator circuits. Decreasing power consumption and increasing the power efficiency factor is considered in... 

Bluetooth low energy, originally developed by Nokia as wibree, was formally introduced by SIG group in 2010. It is a promising technology for internet of things (IoT) which needs ultra low power consumption. Unlike digital circuits that the power consumption decreases with technology scaling and consequently decreasing the supply voltage, the scaling has not such effect in analog circuits for two reasons. First, the power consumption of an analog circuit is mainly determined by its noise and linearity specification which in almost all cases is determined by the standard. Second, due to noise consideration, analog designers prefer to not to use the latest technology for example because of... 

This research examines the issues of design and fabrication of Phase Shifter circuits on Silicon substrates. The Phase Shifter circuits are designed to have wide operation band width. They also should have very low sensitivity to process and temperature variation. A six bit phase shifter is designed at this research. We use a new topology for implementing the small phase shift steps and some circuits have been designed which their phase shifts can be adjusted after fabrication. All circuits are implemented with the 0.18µm CMOS technology. The research also explains all the necessary steps for measurement of fabricated circuits. The result of measurements shows good agreement with the... 

A DLL-based frequency synthesizer that has the capability of producing fractional multiples of the reference frequency is designed and implemented in this thesis. The new structures for producing fractional multiples of reference frequency with DLLs are also presented. The designed frequency synthesizer is not a Sigma-delta modulator for synthesizing. This structure has a low jitter and phase-noise, low chip area, low settling time and a good stability due to its DLL-based nature. Also, a systematic model for simulating DLLs in MATLAB Simulink is proposed that is very efficient for giving a better insight to designing of DLLs. The settling time of the proposed topology for DLL is 2.5us. The... 

High speed data converters are very often used in telecommunication systems. Since these systems are increasingly used in mobile form reducing the power consumption in these circuits is of great importance. The goal of this project was to design a pipeline 10 bit converter for a sample rate of 40 M sample/s with a power consumption of 20mW for the input level of 1Vp-p and a 1V power supply in 0.13μm CMOS technology. To reach these goals a number of low-power techniques are proposed in various levels of abstraction. In system level, the sampling and feedback capacitors, as well as the stage resolution of the ADC is optimized analytically which leads to simple back-envelope formulas to... 

In recent years, lots of efforts has been done to implement Ultra-Wideband (UWB) Low Noise Amplifiers (LNAs), and Reconfigurable Low Noise Amplifiers, to achieve low Noise Figure (NF) and power dissipation, and high gain and linearity. In this thesis an Ultra-Wideband CMOS Low Noise Amplifier is presented. Due to really low power consumption and extremely high data rates, the UWB standard is popular in the consumer market. The LNA is the outer most part of an UWB transceiver, which provides enough gain to the signal with the least possible noise and distortion. 0.18u CMOS technology has been chosen for the design of the LNA at the transistor level. Two different bandwidths in a single LNA... 

Over the past decade there has been dramatic increase in fossil fuel’s usage; As a consequence, world now faces problems such as: air pollution, climate change, global warming and ozone layer depletion. In addition, depletion of the fossil energy resources is growing as a serious issue. Renewable energy(RE) sources are the most promising solution to these problems. Global investment in clean energy was increased by 16% in 2014 and solar power is anticipated to become the world’s largest source of electricity by 2050 .The German government has planned to achieve a goal of 8 percent renewables for gross power consumption by 2050 .RE is still more expensive than traditional one and faces a... 

Frequency synthesizers are one of the most critical building blocks of RF systems. Their task is to produce high-frequency precise and stable clock signals from a low-frequency source. The signal used in mixers to up-convert and down-convert desired signals in transceivers and the precise clock of analog to digital converters are made by frequency synthesizers. Designing frequency synthesizer, because of its lots of parameter and dependency of these parameters to each other, is a hard task which forces designers to propose new structures. In this thesis, an integer-N frequency synthesizer for Bluetooth application, with the goals of decreasing spurious tones power and settling time, is... 

The Internet of things (IoT) is an emerging technology, encompassing wide aspects of applications. It provides intelligent connections between objects, devices, and living creatures. The IoT devices are mostly powered by limited energy sources like batteries. Therefore, optimizing their power consumption is necessary. First, this idea will be examined from different perspectives and then its applications and challenges in various fields and areas will be presented. The IoT applications require low-cost, low-energy, reliable, robust, secure, and scalable networks. The Low-power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) is considered as one of the most potential solutions for IoT in the near future due to its... 

The use of Radio Frequency Identification is increasing rapidly. The reason is the capability to transfer data wirelessly without line-of-sight necessity, high data rate and long read range. The main advantage of barcode is its lower cost which has ensured its existence for many years. The applications and materials that are identified by RFID increase as the price of RFID tags decrease. This Project deals with the front-end of an Integrated RFID Reader for the UHF band. The bottleneck of the design is the presence of a large interferer just hundreds of kilohertz apart from the desired signal which is at about 900 MHz. The key idea of the design is utilizing feedback in order to cancel... 

Phase shifters are commonly used in the implementation of phased-array antenna systems.The function of these systems is highly dependent on the performance of phase shifters. In addition, phase shifter circuits are used in some applications such as antenna test and regulation, power amplifier linearization, and QAM modulator implementation, to name but a handful. In this project, design of phase shifter blocks, as well as limitations of fabrication on silicon substrate, is studied and these blocks are designed for maximum bandwidth and minimum sensitivity based on fabrication characteristics and environmental conditions. Design of a 6-bit phase shifter based on vector-sum method is the... 

Delta-Sigma Analog-to-Digital converters have been positioned themselves as robust reliable converters so far. The magic Of extracting high resolutions from low bit ADC has made them popular between designers. Previously, the noise-shaping magic was used in high-resolution applications such as high-quality audio signal converters. However, as the technology scales and proceeds, these converters are approaching RF applications, too. Power and OSR trade-off limits this progress. To increase OSR in bandpass delta-sigma modulators, more power should be consumed to increase the quality factor of loop filters. In this thesis, a systematic approach has been utilized. An n-path filter is employed... 

The wideband code-division multiple access (WCDMA) system has been widely used for the third-generation wireless communication system. It uses Frequency division duplexing for two-way communication by a transceiver. Although a duplexer will significantly suppress the TX leakage signal (50dB-60dB), a residual attenuated signal still remains at the receiver input and act as a strong blocker which reduces the sensitivity of the receiver. For reducing the effect of the TX leakage on the RX performance, a band pass RF SAW filter is typically inserted between the LNA and the mixer to reject the TX leakage. However, this filter increases the system cost and size. This encouraged us to propose a novel... 

Considering the drastical increasing of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide, reduction of these gases seems necessary to combat global warming. Fossil fuel power plants are one of the main sources of CO2 emission. In this thesis, CO2 capture from a natural gas fired combined cycle power plant using different oxygen percent in air feed is studied. Aspen Plus was used to evaluate the effect of this capture technology on the plant efficiency and energetic parameters of the system. Aspen Hysys is used to simulate Amine absorption tower and Air Separation cryogenic tower. Since the oxygen production plant, CO2 capture and transport are cost and energy intensive, the cost... 

The steam turbines share a significant part of Iran's electricity production. Evidently improving the performance of these steam turbines will improve the performance of power plants and enhance the capability of power production in Iran. Since the behavior of steam turbines is highly nonlinear and that it is affected by various factors, it is difficult to determine the optimum operating conditions for each turbine in specific unit of a power plant. In addition, it is very difficult to model the turbine behavior based on the mathematical equations. Fortunately a large amount of information is collected and stored annually by the data-processing systems in each power plant. These collected...