SAN FRANCISCO At the International Solid State Circuit Conference (ISSCC) here, IMEC researchers detailed their latest feats in data conversion and wireless 60 GHz.
On the data converter front, three papers detailed ultra-low-power analog-to-digital (ADC) converters targeting wireless software-defined radio (SDR), 60-GHz communication and sensor networks applications. IMEC, the Leuven, Belgium, research consortium, has submitted patents for the architecture of its SAR (successive approximation), Flash and CABS (comparator-based asynchronous binary-search) ADC families, hoping to make these available for product development through licensing as white box IP.
IMEC researchers developed a two-step, 7-bit 150-Msamples/s ADC with a record figure of merit of 10 femtoJoules per conversion step. The innovative CABS ADC architecture consists of a 1-bit coarse ADC and digital-to-analog converter followed by a 6-bit sub-ADC. The 6-bit sub-converter consists of a self-clocked (asynchronous) binary tree of comparators with embedded threshold. The input signal is applied in parallel to all comparators, as in the case of flash converters, but only 6 comparators are triggered by the binary search conversion. The power consumption scales linearly with the sampling rate and equals 0.89 microW per MHz clock rate, resulting in a record figure of merit of 10 fJ/conversion step. “This is a factor 22 improvement compared with state-of-the-art ADCs with a similar number of bits and sampling speed,” said Rudy Lauwereines, vice president, Nomadic Embedded Systems, at IMEC. The ADC was fabricated in 90-nm digital CMOS, and occupies less than 250x250microm 2 .
Meanwhile, in a second paper, IMEC researchers reported beating IMEC's own record SAR ADC with improved power efficiency, making it noise-robust. IMEC realized a 9-bit 40-MSamples/s fully-dynamic noise-tolerant SAR ADC achieving a record figure of merit of 54 fJ/conversion step. “This figure of merit is a 16 percent improvement compared with IMEC's record design presented at last year's ISSCC,” said Lauwereines. That ADC was the world-first charge-based SAR ADC that uses charge-domain signal processing to overcome the fundamental power bottlenecks in successive approximation ADCs. The new design is optimized with an improved sample-and-hold and a noise-robust approach by leveraging redundancy in the search algorithm.
And in its flash ADC, IMEC researchers reached sampling speed above 500 Msamples/s, with a record figure of merit of 50 fJ per conversion step. This is three times better compared with the best ever reported converters with sampling speeds over 500 Msamples/s.
In another slew of technical papers, IMEC researchers introduced a prototype of a 60-GHz multiple antenna receiver. The consortium is inviting the industry to join its 60-GHz research program. The 60-GHz band offers massive available bandwidth that enables very high bit rates of several Gb/s at distances up to 10 meters (about 33 feet). IMEC built its rf solution in a standard digital CMOS process.
The prototype implements a unique programmable phase shift of various incoming signals, which is necessary for beam-forming. The device contains two antenna paths, each consisting of a low-noise amplifier and a down-conversion mixer. The programmable phase shift is realized on the same chip. It starts from the signals of an on-chip quadrature voltage-controlled oscillator (QVCO). This QVCO design reportedly combines the highest oscillation frequency with the largest tuning range ever reported in CMOS.
“This multiple antenna receiver is the first step towards a complete CMOS-based phased array transceiver for 60-GHz wireless personal area networks,” said Lauwereines. “In the next phase of development, we plan to implement four antenna paths using 45-nm CMOS technology and to integrate other subsystems, such as the phase-lock loop, analog-to-digital converter and the patch-antenna array itself.”
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