Solid State Circuits Society

For the digital encoding of analog signals, so-called oversampling modulators combine sampling at well above the Nyquist rate with feedback to exchange resolution in time for that in amplitude.  This concept first emerged in the mid-twentieth century as delta modulation, with potential applications in digital communications.  However, because delta modulators encode the rate of change of a signal, rather than the signal itself, their implementation presented significant practical challenges.  The subsequent evolution of noise shaping modulators in various forms led to robust high-resolution ADC architectures that are ideally suited to realization in modern VLSI technologies.  Commonly referred to as delta-sigma, or sigma-delta, modulators, these architectures have come to dominate precision interfaces between analog and digital signals at frequencies below a few megahertz.In this talk, Professor Wooley reviews the history of oversampling ADCs as seen from his perspective as a research engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1970 to 1984.  He’ll also make a few remarks about the founding of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society, and it’s predecessor, the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Council.

Bruce A. Wooley is the Robert L. and Audrey S. Hancock Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, and a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.  He received a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1970, and from 1970 to 1984 he was a member of the research staff at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, NJ.  In 1984 he joined the faculty at Stanford, where he has served as the Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Senior Associate Dean of Engineering.  His research is in the field of integrated circuit design, where his interests include low-power mixed-signal circuit design, oversampling analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion, circuit design techniques for video and image data acquisition, high-speed embedded memory, high-performance packaging and testing, and circuits for wireless and wireline communications.

Prof. Wooley is a Fellow of the IEEE and a past President of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society.  He has served as the Editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits and as the Chairman of both the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) and the Symposium on VLSI Circuits.  Awards he has received include the University Medal from the University of California, Berkeley, the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits Best Paper Award, recognition for his Outstanding Contributions to the Technical Papers of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference on the occasion of the conference’s fiftieth anniversary, the Outstanding Alumnus Award from the EECS Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Technical Field Award (now the Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits).

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

Texas Instruments Building E Auditorium
2900 Semiconductor Dr., Santa Clara, CA 95051 Directions and 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.