Events Calendar

Integrated Systems Seminar Series - Spring 2014

Speaker: Jose Silva-Martinez, Texas A&M University

Talk Title: Recent Advances and Challenges on High Performance Analog-to-Digital Converters

Series: Integrated Systems Seminar Series

Abstract: Recent developments in mobile computing and wireless internet have led to exponential growth in demand for portable computers and smart phones equipped with WLAN operating at different standards. The digital computing required by these gadgets is facilitated by process scaling that follows Moore’s law and is expected to continue down to 10nm physical gate lengths. Applications such as TV receivers require broadband operation (>800MHz) with over 12 bits resolution; the pipeline architecture is the most popular one, but recently SAR topology is emerging as more power efficient solution. On the other hand, various wireless standards have been developed over the last years due to the high demand for faster data rate in portable wireless communications, which has pushed baseband bandwidths up to a few tens of MHz while requiring minimum power consumption. When high-resolution continuous-time lowpass Σ∆ ADC architectures are selected for emerging products because of their efficiency, a wide bandwidth is essential in multi-standard applications to accommodate receiver bandwidth requirements.
In this lecture, the fundamentals of pipeline will be revised and limitations due to unavoidable mismatches and clock jitter are analyzed. Recent advances in achieving high-resolution, >800 MHz bandwidth and low power will be discussed. It will be shown that one of the remaining bottle necks is the lack of an efficient calibration for applications that require ENOB>10bits. An efficient full digital background calibration scheme that requires minimal digital resources will be discussed in this seminar. Limitations in ΔΣ modulators due to clock jitter and the presence of strong blockers will be quantified; technology trends will be highlighted. Significant research efforts have been devoted to find efficient solutions for the remaining issues: better linearity, wider bandwidth, robustness to clock jitter and co-existence with other standards. In particular, the feedback DAC nonlinearity significantly affects the ADC performance because it directly adds error to the filter input signal and it is not noise-shaped. The foundations on ΔΣ modulators will be covered first and then we will elaborate on linearity limitations as well as jitter and blocker tolerance issues. Two case studies experimentally verified are presented to illustrate design issues and to give insights into the possibilities that exist for solving these contemporary challenges with analog hardware and software-based processing techniques.


Biography: Jose Silva-Martinez got his PhD degree from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium in 1992. He currently holds the rank of Texas Instruments Professor in Analog Engineering at the Department of ECE, Texas A&M University. Dr. Silva-Martinez is an IEEE-Fellow, member of the 2013-2014 CASS Distinguish Lecture Program and 2014-2015 Editor-in-Chief of IEEE TCAS-II. His record of publications show over 105 journals and 160 conferences, 2 books and 12 book chapters and 1 patent. He is co-author of the papers that received the 2011 Best Student Paper Award, IEEE MWCAS, the 2003 Best Student Paper Award, IEEE RF-IC, and recipient of the 1990 Best Paper Award, European Solid-State Circuits Conference (ESSCIRC). He got the 2005 Outstanding Professor Award by the ECE Department, Texas A&M University, 2005; co-advised in Testing techniques the student who was Winner of the 2005 Best Doctoral Thesis Award, presented by the IEEE Test Technology Technical Council (TTTC), IEEE Computer Society.

Host: Hossien Hashemi, Mike Chen, Mahta Moghaddam, Sushil Subramanian

More Info: http://mhi.usc.edu/activities/integrated-systems/

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Sushil Subramanian

Event Link: http://mhi.usc.edu/activities/integrated-systems/