Low-power CMOS digital design with dual embedded adaptive powersupplies

A low-power CMOS design methodology with dual embedded adaptive power supplies is presented. A variable supply-voltage scheme for dual power supplies, namely, the dual-VS scheme, is presented. It is found that the lower supply voltage should be set at 0.7 of the higher supply voltage to minimize chip power dissipation. This knowledge aids designers in the decision of the optimal supply voltages within a restricted design time. An MEPG-4 video codec chip is designed at 2.5 and 1.75 V for internal circuits that are generated from an external power supply of 3.3 V by the dual-VS circuits. Power dissipation is reduced by 57% without degrading circuit performance compared to a conventional CMOS design     

A half-pel precision MPEG2 motion-estimation processor withconcurrent three-vector search

A half-pel precision MPEG2 motion estimation processor using a 0.5 μm CMOS technology supports all prediction modes in MPEG2 including frame, field and dual-prime prediction, and estimates three vectors concurrently. The multiple processor configuration allows a search range expansion by ±127.5, keeping bus traffic constant. It integrates 850 K transistors in a 13.85 mm×13.55 mm silicon die. The observed maximum operating frequency is 75 MHz. At 40 MHz for NTSC, the peak computational power is 20 GOPS and the power dissipation is 1.9 W     

2.5GHz低相位噪声CMOS LC VCO的设计

用0.35μm、一层多晶、四层金属、3.3V的标准全数字CMOS工艺设计了一个全集成的2.5GHz LC VCO,电路采用全差分互补负跨导结构以降低电路功耗和减少器件1/f噪声的影响.为了减少高频噪声的影响,采用了在片LC滤波技术.可变电容采用增强型MOS可变电容,取得了23%的频率调节范围.采用单个16边形的对称片上螺旋电感,并在电感下加接地屏蔽层,从而减少芯片面积,优化Q值.取得了在离中心频率1MHz处-118dBc/Hz的相位噪声性能.电源电压为3.3V时的功耗为4mA.     

低功耗Zigbee收发器镜像抑制滤波器设计

分析镜像抑制和带外衰减的要求,设计了适用于2.4 GHz Zigbee无线收发前端的镜像抑制滤波器.电路采用7阶巴特沃思OTA-C双二次结构.通过线性变换实现复数滤波.采用交叉耦合输入跨导器,扩大了输入线性范围.为减小滤波器频率偏差,设计了一种锁相环频率修调电路.电路利用0.18 μm CMOS工艺实现.测试结果表明,复数滤波器带宽2.54MHz,镜像抑制大于35 dB,偏移3.5 MHz抑制超过50 dB.在1.8 V电源电压下电流为0.86 mA.     

Algorithmic Design of CMOS LNAs and PAs for 60-GHz Radio

Sixty-gigahertz power (PA) and low-noise (LNA) amplifiers have been implemented, based on algorithmic design methodologies for mm-wave CMOS amplifiers, in a 90-nm RF-CMOS process with thick 9-metal-layer Cu backend and transistor f_T/f_MAX of 120 GHz/200 GHz. The PA, fabricated for the first time in CMOS at 60 GHz, operates from a 1.5-V supply with 5.2 dB power gain, a 3-dB bandwidth >13 GHz, a P _1dB of +6.4 dBm with 7% PAE and a saturated output power of +9.3 dBm at 60 GHz. The LNA represents the first 90-nm CMOS implementation at 60 GHz and demonstrates improvements in noise, gain and power dissipation compared to earlier 60-GHz LNAs in 160-GHz SiGe HBT and 0.13-mum CMOS technologies. It features 14.6 dB gain, an IIP ₃ of -6.8 dBm, and a noise figure lower than 5.5 dB, while drawing 16 mA from a 1.5-V supply. The use of spiral inductors for on-chip matching results in highly compact layouts, with the total PA and LNA die areas with pads measuring 0.35times0.43 mm² and 0.35times0.40 mm², respectively     

A 14 mW 2.5 MS/s 14 bit Σ∆ Modulator Using Split-Path Pseudo-Differential Amplifiers

This paper presents the design and experimental results of a 1.25 MHz signal bandwidth 14 bit CMOS SigmaDelta modulator. With our proposed switched-capacitor split-path pseudo-differential amplifiers, this modulator achieves high power efficiency, high sampling frequency, and small die area. A new signal and reference front-end sampling network eliminates the input common-mode voltage and reduces power consumption and linearity requirement of the opamp. A prototype chip has been designed and fabricated in a 0.25 mum CMOS technology with a core area of 0.27 mm². Experimental results show that an 84 dB dynamic range is achieved over a 1.25 MHz signal bandwidth when clocked at 125 MHz. The power dissipation is 14 mW at 2.4 V including on-chip voltage reference buffers.     

An on-chip active decoupling circuit to suppress crosstalk in deep-submicron CMOS mixed-signal SoCs

A decoupling circuit using an operational amplifier is proposed to suppress substrate crosstalk in mixed-signal system-on-chip (SoC) devices. It overcomes the parasitic inductance problem of on-chip capacitor decoupling. The effect of the proposed decoupling circuit is not limited by parasitic fine impedance. A 0.13-/spl mu/m CMOS test chip showed that substrate noise at frequencies from 40 MHz to 1 GHz was incrementally suppressed by sequentially activating three of the proposed circuits in parallel. The power dissipation of each circuit was 3.3 mW at a 1.0-V power supply. The test chip measurement showed that the proposed decoupling reduced crosstalk by 31% at 200 MHz, whereas it was reduced by 4.4% with capacitor decoupling. This 7:1 ratio, or 17 dB, corresponds to the gain of the opamp. Design of the opamp and its feedback loop for active decoupling is simple, making the opamp useful for SoC applications.     

无线局域网接收机用频率综合器的关键技术

对无线局域网接收机用锁相环型频率综合器的几项关键技术进行了研究.首先分析了锁相环型频率综合器的结构并提出了系统的主要参数.采用TSMC 0.18μm射频CMOS工艺设计了一个具有低相位噪声的单片LC调谐型压控振荡器.其在4.189GHz频点上4MHz频偏处所测得的相位噪声为-117dBc/Hz.采用TSMC 0.18μm混合信号CMOS工艺实现了具有低功耗的下变频模块电路.该电路在1.8V电源供电下可正常工作,功耗为13mW.     

Low-Power Parallel Video Compression Architecture for a Single-Chip Digital CMOS Camera

A low-power, large-scale parallel video compression architecture for a single-chip digital CMOS camera is discussed in this paper. This architecture is designed for highly computationally intensive image and video processing tasks necessary to support video compression. Two designs of this architecture, an MPEG2 encoder and a DV encoder, are presented. At an image resolution of 640 × 480 pixels (MPEG2) and 720 × 576 (DV) and a frame rate of 25 to 30 frames per second, a computational throughput of up to 1.8 billion operations per second (BOPS) is required. This is supported in the proposed architecture using a 40 MHz clock and an array of 40 to 45 parallel processors implemented in a 0.2 m CMOS technology and with a 1.5 V supply voltage. Power consumption is significantly reduced through the single-chip integration of the CMOS photo sensors, the embedded DRAM technology, and the proposed pipelined parallel processors. The parallel processors consume approximately 45 mW of power resulting a power efficiency of 40 BOPS/W.     

Monolithic transformers and their application in a differentialCMOS RF low-noise amplifier

A 900 MHz low-noise amplifier (LNA) utilizing three monolithic transformers to implement on-chip tuning networks and requiring no external components has been integrated in 2.88 mm² in a standard digital 0.6 μm CMOS process. A bias current reuse technique is employed to reduce power dissipation, and process-, voltage-, and temperature-tracking biasing techniques are used. At 900 MHz, the LNA dissipates 18 mW from a single 3 V power supply and provides 4.1 dB noise figure, 12.3 dB power gain, -33.0 dB reverse isolation, and an input 1-db compression level of -16 dBm. Analysis and modeling considerations for silicon-based monolithic transformers are presented, and it is shown that a monolithic transformer occupies less die area and provides a higher quality factor than two independent inductors with the same effective inductance in differential applications     

A 160-MHz, 32-b, 0.5-W CMOS RISC microprocessor

This paper describes a 160 MHz 500 mW 32 b StrongARM(R) microprocessor designed for low-power, low-cost applications. The chip implements the ARM(R) V4 instruction set and is bus compatible with earlier implementations. The pin interface runs at 3.3 V but the internal power supplies can vary from 1.5 to 2.2 V, providing various options to balance performance and power dissipation. At 160 MHz internal clock speed with a nominal Vdd of 1.65 V, it delivers 185 Dhrystone 2.1 MIPS while dissipating less than 450 mW. The range of operating points runs from 100 MHz at 1.65 V dissipating less than 300 mW to 200 MHz at 2.0 V for less than 900 mW. An on-chip PLL provides the internal clock based on a 3.68 MHz clock input. The chip contains 2.5 million transistors, 90% of which are in the two 16 kB caches. It is fabricated in a 0.35-μm three-metal CMOS process with 0.35 V thresholds and 0.25 μm effective channel lengths. The chip measures 7.8 mm×6.4 mm and is packaged in a 144-pin plastic thin quad flat pack (TQFP) package     

The design of wideband and low-power CMOS active polyphase filter and its application in RF double-quadrature receivers

In this work, a new technique to implement the transfer function of polyphase filter with CMOS active components is proposed and analyzed. In the proposed polyphase filter structure, the currents mirrored from capacitors and the transistors in a single-stage are used to realize high-pass and low-pass functions, respectively. The multistage structure expands the frequency bandwidth to more than 20 MHz. Furthermore, a constant-gm bias circuit is employed to decrease the sensitivity of image rejection to temperature and process variations. HSPICE simulations are performed to confirm the performance. With the current-mode operation, the low-voltage version of proposed active polyphase filters was designed. It can be operated at 1-V power supply with similar performance but with only 50% of the power dissipation of the normal-voltage version. The proposed four-stage polyphase filter is fabricated in 0.25-/spl mu/m CMOS 1P5M technology. The measured image rejection ratio is higher than -48 dB at frequencies of 6.1 MHz/spl sim/30 MHz. The measured voltage gain is 6.6 dB at 20 MHz and IIP3 is 8 dBm. The power dissipation is 11 mW at a supplied voltage of 2.5 V and the active chip area is 1162/spl times/813 /spl mu/m/sup 2/.     

A Novel DCXO Module for Clock Synchronization in MPEG2 Transport System

This paper presents a unique on-chip digital control crystal oscillator (DCXO) module that is used for clock synchronization in MPEG2 data transport system. This module is built inside a phase-locked loop (PLL) and is achieved through flying-adder frequency synthesis architecture. It is designed at 27 MHz with a tuning range of ${pm}10$ kHz. The linearity at the range of 27 MHz ${pm}10$ kHz is measured as 0.001%. The frequency resolution is 1.6 Hz. This DCXO and its associated PLL consume 10 mW and occupies 0.15 mm$^{2}$ in a 90-nm CMOS process. The contribution of this work is that this built-in DCXO can completely eliminate the need of external voltage-control crystal oscillator (VCXO) chip or on-chip VCXO block in MPEG2 clock synchronization and thus significantly reduces the system cost. This module has been used in a real HDTV SoC chip.      

A 195 mW/152 mW Mobile Multimedia SoC With Fully Programmable 3-D Graphics and MPEG4/H.264/JPEG

In this paper, we present a low power multimedia SoC with fully programmable 3-D graphics, MPEG4 codec, H.264 decoder, and JPEG codec for mobile devices. The mobile unified shader in 3-D graphics engine provides fully programmable 3-D graphics pipeline with 35% area and 28% power reduction. Low power lighting engine which employs logarithmic number datapath and the specialized lighting instruction enable 9.1 Mvertices/s vertex fill rate, which is 2.5 times improvement compared with previous works including transformations and OpenGL lighting. The SoC consumes less than 152 mW for video applications and less than 195 mW for 3-D graphics applications. The mobile unified shader and merged JPEG/MPEG4 codec reduce the silicon area and the SoC consumes 6.4 mm $times$ 6.4 mm in 0.13 $mu{hbox {m}}$ CMOS logic process.      

CMOS high-frequency switched-capacitor filters fortelecommunication applications

A digitally programmable high-frequency switched-capacitor filter for use in a switched digital video (SDV/VDSL) link is described. The highest available clock frequency in the system is 51.84 MHz (f_s =2f_clock=103.68 MHz for double sampling) while the three desired low-pass corner frequencies (f_c) are 8,12, and 20 MHz. The double-sampling, bilinear, elliptic, fifth-order switched-capacitor filter meets the desired -40-dB attenuation at 1.3 f _c, and -30 dB at 1.25 f_c. For the 12-MHz corner frequency setting, given the 2V_pp differential input, the measured worst case total harmonic distortion is -60 dB, with signal-to-noise ratio of 54 dB. The analog power dissipation is 125 mW from a 5-V power supply. The test results indicate that the clock frequency can be increased to 73 MHz without any ill effects. More measurements verify that an all-digital CMOS implementation, utilizing metal-sandwich capacitors, performs as well as the special-layer analog capacitors implementation, with a small reduction in the absolute corner frequencies. The prototype IC's are fabricated in a 0.35-μm 5-V (0.48 μm drawn) CMOS process     

Hardware‐Software Implementation of MPEG‐4 Video Codec

This paper presents an MPEG‐4 video codec, called MoVa, for video coding applications that adopts 3G‐324M. We designed MoVa to be optimal by embedding a cost‐effective ARM7TDMI core and partitioning it into hardwired blocks and firmware blocks to provide a reasonable tradeoff between computational requirements, power consumption, and programmability. Typical hardwired blocks are motion estimation and motion compensation, discrete cosine transform and quantization, and variable length coding and decoding, while intra refresh, rate control, error resilience, error concealment, etc. are implemented by software. MoVa has a pipeline structure and its operation is performed in four stages at encoding and in three stages at decoding. It meets the requirements of MPEG‐4 SP@L2 and can perform either 30 frames/s (fps) of QCIF or SQCIF, or 7.5 fps (in codec mode) to 15 fps (in encode/decode mode) of CIF at a maximum clock rate of 27 MHz for 128 kbps or 144 kbps. MoVa can be applied to many video systems requiring a high bit rate and various video formats, such as videophone, videoconferencing, surveillance, news, and entertainment.     

A monolithic current-mode CMOS DC-DC converter with on-chip current-sensing technique

A monolithic current-mode CMOS DC-DC converter with integrated power switches and a novel on-chip current sensor for feedback control is presented in this paper. With the proposed accurate on-chip current sensor, the sensed inductor current, combined with the internal ramp signal, can be used for current-mode DC-DC converter feedback control. In addition, no external components and no extra I/O pins are needed for the current-mode controller. The DC-DC converter has been fabricated with a standard 0.6-/spl mu/m CMOS process. The measured absolute error between the sensed signal and the inductor current is less than 4%. Experimental results show that this converter with on-chip current sensor can operate from 300 kHz to 1 MHz with supply voltage from 3 to 5.2 V, which is suitable for single-cell lithium-ion battery supply applications. The output ripple voltage is about 20 mV with a 10-/spl mu/F off-chip capacitor and 4.7-/spl mu/H off-chip inductor. The power efficiency is over 80% for load current from 50 to 450 mA.     

A 320 MHz CMOS triple 8 bit DAC with on-chip PLL and hardwarecursor

A 320 MHz triple 8 bit DAC with on-chip phase-locked loop (PLL), hardware cursor function, and an architecture that relies on time-interleaved logic blocks is presented. Overall device performance is optimized by operating different portions of the circuit at different frequencies and combining parallelism with time-interleaving to minimize the hardware cost. Clock multiplication by the on-chip PLL improved the maximum frequency of operation of the prototype circuits by 20 percent. The PLL operates from 20-500 MHz and has a peak-to-peak jitter of 60 ps at an operating frequency of 432 MHz. The 10 mm×10 mm chip was fabricated in a 0.8 μm CMOS process and dissipates 1.54 W from a single 5 V supply     

A video DSP with a macroblock-level-pipeline and a SIMD typevector-pipeline architecture for MPEG2 CODEC

A video DSP with macroblock-level-pipeline and a SIMD type vector-pipeline architecture (VDSP2) has been developed, using 0.5 μm triple-layer-metal CMOS technology. This 17.00 mm×15.00 mm chip consists of 2.5 M transistors, and operates at 100 MHz. The real-time encoder and decoder specified in the MPEG2 main profile at the main level can be realized with two VDSP2's and a motion estimation (ME) unit, and one VDSP2 respectively, at an 80 MHz clock rate, with a total power dissipation of 4.2 W at 3.3 V     

A 900-MHz fully integrated SOI power amplifier for single-chipwireless transceiver applications

This paper presents a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) fully integrated RF power amplifier for single-chip wireless transceiver applications. The integrated power amplifier (IPA) operates at 900 MHz, and is designed and fabricated using a 1.5-μm SOI LDMOS/CMOS/BJT technology. This technology is suitable for the complete integration of the front-end circuits with the baseband circuits for low-cost low-power high-volume production of single-chip transceivers. The IPA is a two-stage Class E power amplifier. It is fabricated along with the on-chip input and output matching networks. Thus, no external components are needed. At 900 MHz and with a 5-V supply, the power amplifier delivers 23-dBm output power to a 50-Ω load with 16-dB gain and 49% power-added efficiency