Events Calendar

CENG Seminar

Speaker: Mingoo Seok, Texas Instruments

Talk Title: Extremely Energy Efficient Integrated Circuit and System Design for Millimeter Scale Implantable Medical Devices

Abstract: Millimeter scale implantable medical devices with years of lifetime can bring revolutionary advancements in health care. They could be safely introduced into human body without invasive operations and constantly monitor physiological signs without having to be replaced. However, it is very challenging to create such devices. Why? Conventional circuit and system design techniques fail to deliver the required energy efficiency to satisfy such long lifetime requirement with the constraint of almost invisible system volume. In order to improve energy efficiency, it has been suggested to scale supply voltage down to near or below transistor threshold voltages. However, such ultra low voltage operation is by itself insufficient to achieve the sub-nW power budget of millimeter scale medical devices. Also, it creates several other challenges such as performance degradation, heightened variability, and circuit robustness.

In this talk, I will discuss ultra low voltage systems and present a range of new circuit, and architectural design approaches to overcome the above challenges, and thus lead to millimeter scale medical systems. This talk will focus on three relevant projects from my dissertation: a 35pW sensing platform (Phoenix Processor), a 2-transistor voltage reference, and a Fast Fourier Transform core. In these projects, we successfully improved energy efficiency, performance, and variability, bringing the abstract concept of millimeter scale medical devices towards practical applications. Our proposed approaches provided record-setting energy efficiency in major building blocks such as microcontrollers, embedded memories, power conversion circuits, and DSP accelerators. The improvements were extensively verified through numerous silicon demonstrations.


Biography: Mingoo Seok is currently pursiung PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan. Seok’s thesis is entitled “Extreme Power-Constrained Integrated Circuit Design”. His research contributions and interest are in the area of sub- or near-threshold logic circuits and ultra low power architectures and sensors. During his PhD, he published more than 25 journal and conference papers. His work contributed to the improvement of energy efficiency, performance, and variability in energy-constrained systems, allowing the abstract concept of millimeter-scale implantable medical devices to be translated into practical applications.

Mingoo Seok received a 1998 Excellency Fellowship from Seoul National University, a 1999 Distinguished Undergraduate Scholarship from the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies, a 2005 Doctoral Fellowship from the same organization, and a 2008 Rackham Pre-Doctoral Fellowship from the University of Michigan. He also won the 2009 AMD/CICC Student Scholarship Award for picowatt voltage reference design and 2009 DAC/ISSCC Student Design Contest for the 35pW sensor platform design, also known as Phoenix Processor. He holds one pending US patent and two invention disclosures. He is currently a member of technical staff at the R&D center of Texas Instruments, focusing on ultra low power communication systems and security-enhancing circuit techniques.


Host: Prof. Viktor Prasanna

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

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Estela Lopez