Solid State Circuits Society

April 29, 2010

Speaker: Prof. Franco Maloberti (Distinguished Lecturer of the Solid State Circuit Society and Fellow of IEEE)

Title: Power Efficient Data Converters

Abstract:

Portable and nomadic systems require developing power effective and power aware design methodologies for either analog or digital circuits. For data converters, low power and optimal resolution imply a favourable allocation of the noise budget. The noise comes from different sources: quantisation, sampling, clock jitter, spur interference and board interference. The distribution of the available noise power, that becomes lower and lower as the supply diminishes, depends on the specification of the system and it may require one or more extra-bits in the data converter. The noise budget issue is new; it was rarely faced in the past when power was just a concern for limiting the chip temperature. The growing relevance of power efficiency is demonstrated by the great attention on the figure of merit (FoM) of data converters that, in the past few years, has been reduced by almost two orders of magnitudes. The presentation will show that obtaining power effectiveness is a matter of trade-offs between architecture, design methodologies, and implementation of circuits. Advancements in technology challenge data converter design. In addition to a reduced supply voltage, the worsening of transconductance and output resistance degrades the intrinsic gain and makes it difficult to design high gain op-amps. Noise, both thermal and 1/f, also increases. Moreover, accuracy and linearity of passive and active components is problematic at minimum features. All those limits must be understood and accounted for to ensure effective data converters design. After discussing the above general issues this presentation will describe the design of significant achievements and illustrate their experimental verifications. The given design examples, pertaining data converters operating in different regions of conversion speed and resolution, are a band-pass sigma-delta, a power effective sigma-delta for DVB-H, some digital-assisted sigma-delta schemes and an ultra low-power SAR.

Speaker Biography:

Prof. Franco Maloberti received the Laurea degree in physics (summa cum laude) from the University of Parma, Parma, Italy, in 1968, and the Doctorate Honoris Causa in electronics from the Instituto Nacional de Astrofisica, Optica y Electronica (Inaoe), Puebla, Mexico, in 1996. He was the TI/J.Kilby Chair Professor at the A&M University, Texas and the Distinguished Microelectronic Chair Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. He was a Visiting Professor at The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH-PEL), Zurich, Switzerland and at the EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland. Presently he is Microelectronics Professor, Head of the Micro Integrated Systems Group, University of Pavia, Italy and Honorary Professor, University of Macau, China SAR. His professional expertise is in the design, analysis, and characterisation of integrated circuits and analog digital applications, mainly in the areas of switched-capacitor circuits, data converters, interfaces for telecommunication and sensor systems, and CAD for analog and mixed A/D design. He has written more then 400 published papers on journals or conference proceedings, four books, and holds 30 patents. Prof. Maloberti was the recipient of the XII Pedriali Prize for his technical and scientific contributions to national industrial production, in 1992. He was co-recipient of the 1996 Fleming Premium, IEE, the best Paper award, ESSCIRC-2007, and the best paper award, IEEJ Analog Workshop-2007. He received the 1999 IEEE CAS Society Meritorious Service Award, the 2000 IEEE CAS Society Golden Jubilee Medal, and the IEEE Millenium Medal. Dr. Maloberti was Vice-President, Region 8, of the IEEE Circuit and Systems Society (1995-1997), Associate Editor of IEEE-Transaction on Circuit and System-II 1998 and 2006-07, President of the IEEE Sensor Council (2002-2003), member of the BoG of the IEEE-CAS Society (2003-2005) and Vice-President, Publications, of the IEEE CAS Society (2007-2008). He is Distinguished Lecturer of the Solid State Circuit Society and Fellow of IEEE.

SCV SSCS Technical meetings are typically held on The THIRD Thursday of each month at:

National Semiconductor Building E Auditorium
2900 Semiconductor Dr., Santa Clara, CA 95051 Directions and NSC Map

Refreshments are provided at 6:00 PM and the talk typically begins at 6:30 PM.
Donations requested to partially cover food cost.

The talks are open to everyone, feel free to join us even if you are not an IEEE member yet.

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