Using a Walking Piezo Actuator to Drive and Control a High-Precision Stage

Piezoelectric actuators are commonly used for micropositioning systems at nanometer resolution. Increasing demands regarding the speed and accuracy are inducing the need for new actuators and new drive principles. A nonresonant piezoelectric actuator is used to drive a stage with 1-DOF through four piezoelectric drive legs. In order to improve the positioning accuracy of the stage, a new drive principle and control strategy for the walking piezomotor are proposed in this paper. The proposed drive principle results in overlapping tip trajectories of the drive legs, resulting in a continuous and smooth drive movement. Gain scheduling feedback in combination with feedforward control further improves the performance of the stage. With the developed drive principle and control strategy, the piezomotor is able to drive the stage at constant velocities between 100 nm/s and 1 $mu$m/s with a tracking error below the encoder resolution of 5 nm. Constant velocities up to 2 mm/s are performed with tracking errors below 400 nm. Point-to-point movements between 5 nm and the complete stroke of the stage are performed with a final static error below the encoder resolution.      

A 0.5-bit step multi-resolution adjustable-input range reconfigurable noise-shaping TDC using multi-step quantizer gated-ring oscillators

A reconfigurable noise-shaping time-to-digital converter (TDC) with adjustable resolution and input range is presented as a solution to nonlinear multi-input readout systems. By varying the frequency of a multi-step quantizer gated-ring oscillator (MSQ-GRO), the resolution and input range are adjusted without affecting the acquisition time. A prototype of a standalone second-order MASH MSQ-GRO-TDC operating over a 34 μs adjustable input range and covering five resolution modes is presented. The MSQ-GRO frequency changes by a factor of approximately \(\sqrt 2\), thus adjusting the resolution in steps of 0.5-bit. With a 12 MHz sampling frequency, the MSQ-GRO-TDC consumes 0.85 mW from a 1.2 V supply and achieves integrated noise of 42.8 and 1.9 ps_rms in 500 and 1 kHz bandwidths, respectively. The measured resolution is 13.3-to-15.3 bits with a sampling signal of 200 kHz in a 5 kHz bandwidth. The input range/resolution optimization allows up to 51% of power saving under the same supply voltage, thus extending the battery lifetime in portable devices. The MSQ-GRO-TDC is used as a data converter for a nonlinear pressure sensor. It achieves a worst-case resolution of 24.5 μbar_rms. It is realized in a standard 0.13 μm CMOS technology and occupies an area of 0.145 mm².     

A Low-Noise Wide-BW 3.6-GHz Digital $DeltaSigma$ Fractional-N Frequency Synthesizer With a Noise-Shaping Time-to-Digital Converter and Quantization Noise Cancellation

A 3.6-GHz digital fractional-N frequency synthesizer achieving low noise and 500-kHz bandwidth is presented. This architecture uses a gated-ring-oscillator time-to-digital converter (TDC) with 6-ps raw resolution and first-order shaping of its quantization noise along with digital quantization noise cancellation to achieve integrated phase noise of less than 300 fs (1 kHz to 40 MHz). The synthesizer includes two 10-bit 50-MHz passive digital-to-analog converters for digital control of the oscillator and an asynchronous frequency divider that avoids divide-value delay variation at its output. Implemented in a 0.13-$mu$m CMOS process, the prototype occupies 0.95-mm$^{2}$ active area and dissipates 39 mW for the core parts with another 8 mW for the oscillator output buffer. Measured phase noise at 3.67 GHz carrier frequency is $-$108 and $-$150 dBc/Hz at 400 kHz and 20 MHz offset, respectively.      

Description of the ISEE satellite-to-satellite kilometric wavelength interferometer system

The International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE)space-craft 1 and 2 carry receivers for detecting electro-magnetic waves with kilometric wavelengths. For selected receiver frequencies from 30 kHz to 2 MHz, a 10 kHz bandwidth channel is single-sideband mixed down to baseband. This analog data and a reference frequency, which is a submultiple of the local oscillator frequency, are transmitted to ground stations and tape recorded along the precise time and frequency information. Cross correlation of these tape recorded signals constitutes a satellite-to-satellite interferometer with a fringe spacing of 0.4’ to 41’ (at a range of 10,000 to 100 km spacing between spacecraft for 250 kHz in frequency) and with a time delay resolution of 32 μs for a 10 kHz bandwidth which gives an angular resolution of 3’ to 6°. For kilometric radiation at the Earth, sources in the size range of 25 to 2500 km can be identified (from 20 R _E ) and located in relative position ranging from 0.02 to 2 R _E depending on spacecraft spacing. Reception and analysis of Solar and Jovian bursts may also be possible.     

Regulated Switched-Capacitor Doubler With Interleaving Control for Continuous Output Regulation

A dual-branch 1.8 V to 3.3 V regulated switched-capacitor voltage doubler with an embedded low dropout regulator is presented. For the power stage, the power switches are individually controlled by their phase signals using a phase-delayed gate drive scheme, and are turned on and off in proper sequence to eliminate both short-circuit and reversion currents during phase transitions. For the regulator, the two branches operate in an interleaving fashion to achieve continuous output regulation with small output ripple voltage. Dual-loop feedback capacitor multiplier is adopted for loop compensation and a P-switch super source follower with high current sinking capability is inserted to drive switching capacitive load, and push the pole at the gate of the output power transistor to high frequency for better stability. The regulated doubler has been fabricated in a 0.35 $mu{hbox {m}}$ CMOS process. It operates at a switching frequency of 500 kHz with an output capacitor of 2 $muhbox{F}$ , and the maximum output voltage ripple is only 10 mV for a load current that ranges from 10 mA to 180 mA. The load regulation is 0.0043%/mA, and the load transient is 7.5 $mu{hbox {s}}$ for a load change of 160 mA to 10 mA, and 25 $mu{hbox {s}}$ for a load change of 10 mA to 160 mA.      

Active Control of Microinterferometers for Low-Noise Parallel Operation

Active control of phase-sensitive interferometric metrology systems is necessary for low noise, high resolution, high bandwidth, and parallel operation. Conventional active control methods have several drawbacks like low SNR, high complexity, and low bandwidth. With the development of micromachined scanning grating interferometers ( $mu$SGIs), high-bandwidth parallel active control of an array of interferometers is feasible. This paper introduces a novel “recurrent-calibration-based active control algorithm.” Utilizing the high-bandwidth integrated electrostatic actuator, this algorithm splits the calibration of the optics and the displacement measurement in time to achieve better noise reduction. The novel algorithm is implemented digitally using a field-programmable gate array on an array of $mu$SGIs simultaneously. Nonlinearity and the limited range of actuation of the electrostatic actuator affect the performance of the active control. It is compensated by using a lookup table and a gain reversal algorithm. A system model is built to design and analyze the control algorithm. A $mu$SGI interferometer setup validates the model and control approach. The control algorithm reduces the vibration noise by 40 dB at low frequencies with a cutoff frequency of 6.5 kHz. The resolution of the $mu$SGI coupled with the control system is measured as $hbox{1} times hbox{10}^{-4} hbox{nm}_{rm rms}/surd hbox{Hz}$ .      

A Spectral-Scanning Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) Transceiver

An integrated spectral-scanning nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) transceiver is implemented in a 0.12$ mu$m SiGe BiCMOS process. The MRI transmitter and receiver circuitry is designed specifically for small-scale surface MRI diagnostics applications where creating low (below 1 T) and inhomogeneous magnetic field is more practical. The operation frequency for magnetic resonance detection and analysis is tunable from 1 kHz to 37 MHz, corresponding to 0–0.9 T magnetization for $^{1}$ H (Hydrogen). The concurrent measurement bandwidth is approximately one frequency octave. The chip can also be used for conventional narrowband nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy from 1 kHz up to 250 MHz. This integrated transceiver consists of both the magnetic resonance transmitter which generates the required excitation pulses for the magnetic dipole excitation, and the receiver which recovers the responses of the dipoles.      

An ultra-low power integer-N frequency synthesizer for MICS transceivers

The ultra-low power frequency synthesizer for the transceivers used in the application of Medical Implantable Communication Services (MICS) is presented. The MICS band is from 402 to 405 MHz. Each channel spacing is 300 kHz. Integer-N architecture is used to implement the frequency synthesizer. The post layout simulations show that the total power consumption of the system is less than at 1.2 V power supply. The gains of the charge pump and voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) are and 50 MHz/V, respectively. The standard 300 kHz external clock is used as the reference. The design is carried out in the IBM 90 nm 9LPRF CMOS technology.     

A CMOS Low-Noise Instrumentation Amplifier Using Chopper Modulation

This paper describes a low-power, low-noise chopper stabilized CMOS instrumentation amplifier for biomedical applications. Low thermal noise is achieved by employing MOSTs biased in the weak/moderate inversion region, whereas chopper stabilization is utilized to shift 1/f-noise out of the signal band hereby ensuring overall low noise performance. The resulting equivalent input referred noise is approximately 7 nV/ ?{Hz}\sqrt{\rm Hz} for a chopping frequency of 20 kHz. The amplifier operates from a modest supply voltage of 1.8 V, drawing 136 A of current thus consuming 245 W of power. The gain is 72.5 dB over a 4 kHz bandwidth. The inband PSRR is above 90 and the CMRR exceeds 105 dB.     

Phase Locked BWO System for Open Resonator Measurement in D-Band

The combination of a D-Band phase-locked backward-wave oscillator (BWO) with a spectrum analyzer for measurement of permittivity and low loss-tangent is presented. For measuring low loss tangent material, such as CVD diamond and high purity semi-insulating $(HPSI)$ $4H-{rm SiC}$ , at millimeter wave ranges, it is necessary to precisely measure an increase of a few kHz in a line-width of 200 kHz. We describe a phase-locked loop with frequency conversion that combines a BWO source and a microwave spectrum analyzer to obtain line-width measurements with less than 2 kHz (less than 1%) standard deviation in D-Band millimeter wave.