A 1-Gb/s bidirectional I/O buffer using the current-mode scheme

A current-mode bidirectional I/O buffer was designed, and the maximum effective bandwidth of 1.0 Gb/s per wire was obtained from measurements. To enhance the operating speed, the voltage swing on the transmission line was reduced to 0.5 V and the internal nodes of the buffer were designed to be low impedance nodes using the current-mode scheme. An automatic impedance-matching scheme was used to generate bias voltages, which adjust output resistance of the buffer to be equal to the characteristic impedance of the transmission line in spite of process variations. The chip was fabricated by using a 0.8-μm CMOS technology. The chip size was 500×330 μm², and the power consumption was 50 mW at a supply voltage of 3 V     

A 2.5-V, 72-Mbit, 2.0-GByte/s packet-based DRAM with a 1.0-Gbps/pininterface

A 2.5-V, 72-Mbit DRAM based on packet protocol has been developed using (1) a rotated hierarchical I/O architecture to reduce power noise and to minimize the chip-size penalty associated with an 8-bit prefetch architecture implemented with 16 internal banks and 144 I/O lines, (2) a delay-locked-loop circuit using a high-speed and small-swing differential clock to achieve the peak bandwidth of 2.0 GByte/s in a single chip with low noise sensitivity, and (3) a flexible column redundancy scheme to efficiently increase redundancy coverage using a shifted I/O line scheme for multibank architecture     

A 2.5-V 2.0-Gbyte/s 288-Mb packet-based DRAM with enhanced cellefficiency and noise immunity

A 2.5-V 288-Mb packet-based DRAM with 32 banks and 18-DQ organization architecture achieving a peak bandwidth of 2.0-GB/s at V _DD=2.25 V and T=100°C has been developed using (1) an area- and performance-efficient chip architecture with a mixture of high-speed interface circuits with DRAM peripheral circuits to increase cell efficiency; (2) a multilevel controlled bitline equalizing scheme and a distributed sense amplifier driving scheme to enhance DRAM core timing margin while increasing the number of cells per wordline for cell efficiency over the previous subwordline driving scheme; (3) a flexible column redundancy scheme with multiple fuse boxes instead of excessive spare memory cell arrays for 143 internal I/O architecture; and (4) optimized I/O circuits and pin parasitic design including pad and package to maximize the operating frequency     

An I/Q-Channel Time-Interleaved Bandpass Sigma–Delta Modulator for a Low-IF Receiver

This brief proposes a multiplexing scheme to realize an I/Q-channel time-interleaved (TI) bandpass sigma-delta modulator that shares operational transconductance amplifiers to minimize power consumption and silicon area for a low-intermediate-frequency (IF) wireless receiver. The test chip was fabricated for a 10.7-MHz IF system with a 0.35-mum CMOS process. The measured peak signal-to-noise distortion ratio for a 200-kHz bandwidth is approximately 73 dB. The power consumption of the fabricated chip is 61 mW with a 3.3-V supply, and the silicon area is 1.78 mm². The measured channel crosstalk is about -48 dB     

A 600-MHz VLIW DSP

A 600-MHz VLIW digital signal processor (DSP) delivers 4800 MIPS, 2400 (16 b) or 4800 (8 b) million multiply accumulates (MMACs) at 0.3 mW/MMAC (16 b). The chip has 64M transistors and dissipates 719 mW at 600 MHz and 1.2 V, and 200 mW at 300 MHz and 0.9 V. It has an eight-way VLIW DSP core, a two-level memory system, and an I/O bandwidth of 2.4 GB/s. The chip integrates a c64X DSP core with Viterbi and turbo decoders. Architectural and circuit design approaches to achieve high performance and low power using a semi-custom standard cell methodology, while maintaining backward compatibility, are described. The chip is implemented in a 0.13-/spl mu/m CMOS process with six layers of copper interconnect.     

An experimental 80-ns 1-Mbit DRAM with fast page operation

An experimental general purpose 5-V 1-Mb dynamic RAM has been designed for increased performance, high density, and enhanced reliability. The array consists of a one-device overlapped I/O cell with a metal bitline architecture. The cell measures 4.1 /spl mu/m by 8.8 /spl mu/m, which yields a chip size of 5.5 mm by 10.5 mm with an array to chip area ratio of 65.5%. The chip was designed in a double-poly single-metal NMOS technology with selected 1-/spl mu/m levels and an average feature size of 1.5 /spl mu/m. Key design features include a fast page mode cycle with minimum column precharge delay and improved protection for short error rate using a boosted word-line after sense amplifier set scheme. The CAS access time is 40 ns and the cycle is 65 ns at 4.5 V and 85/spl deg/C. The RAS access time is 80 ns and the cycle is 160 ns at 4.5 V and 85/spl deg/C with a typical active power of 625 mW. The chip is usable as a X1, X2, or X4 with the use of block select inputs and the selected package option. The package options include a 500-mil/SUP 2/ pin grid array module with 23 pins, and a 22 pin or 26 pin 300-mil surface solder plastic package.     

一种低功耗的高速光接收器跨阻前置电路设计

为了降低芯片面积和功耗,提出了一种10 Gb/s光接收器跨阻前置放大电路。该电路采用了两个带有可调共源共栅（RGC）输入的交叉有源反馈结构,其中的跨阻放大器未使用电感,从而减少了芯片的总体尺寸。该跨阻前置电路采用0.13μm CMOS工艺设计而成,数据速率高达10 Gb/s。测试结果表明,相比其他类似电路,提出的电路芯片面积和功耗更小,芯片面积仅为0.072mm2,当电源电压为1.3 V时,功率损耗为9.1 mW,实测平均等效输入噪声电流谱密度为20pA/（0.1-10）Hz,且-3dB带宽为6.9 GHz。     

A 125 μW , Fully Scalable MPEG-2 and H.264/AVC Video Decoder for Mobile Applications

A low-power dual-standard video decoder has been developed for mobile applications. It supports MPEG-2 SP@ML and H.264/AVC BL@L4 video decoding in a single chip and features a scalable architecture to reach area/power efficiency. This chip integrates diverse algorithms of MPEG-2 and H.264/AVC to reduce silicon area. Three low-power techniques are proposed. First, a domain-pipelined scalability (DPS) technique is used to optimize the pipelined structure according to the number of processing cycles. Second, bandwidth scalability is implemented via a line-pixel-lookahead (LPL) scheme to improve the external bandwidth and reduce the internal memory size, leading to 51% of memory power reduction compared to a conventional design. Third, low-power motion compensation and deblocking filter are designed to reduce the operating frequency without degrading system performance. A test chip is fabricated in a 0.18mum one-poly six-metal CMOS technology with an area of 15.21 mm². For mobile applications, H.264/AVC and MPEG-2 video decoding of quarter-common intermediate format (QCIF) sequences at 15 frames per second are achieved at 1.15 MHz clock frequency with power dissipation of 125 muW and 108 muW, respectively, at 1V supply voltage     

A 2-Mb/s 256-state 10-mW rate-1/3 Viterbi decoder

This paper presents a low-power bit-serial Viterbi decoder chip with the code rate r=1/3 and the constraint length K=9 (256 states) for next generation wireless communication applications. The architecture of the add-compare-select (ACS) module is based on the bit-serial arithmetic and implemented with the pass transistor logic circuit. A cluster-based ACS placement and state metric routing topology is described for the 256 bit-serial ACS units, which achieves very high area efficiency. In the trace-back operation, a power efficient trace-back scheme, allowing higher memory read access rate than memory write in a time-multiplexing method, is implemented to reduce the number of iterations required to generate a decoded output. In addition, a low-power application-specific memory suitable for the function of survivor path memory has also been developed. The chip's core, implemented using 0.5-μm CMOS technology, contains approximately 200 K transistors and occupies 2.46 mm by 4.17 mm area. This chip can achieve the decode rate of 20 Mb/s under 3.3 V and 2 Mb/s under 1.8 V. The measured power dissipation at 2 Mb/s under 1.8 V is only about 9.8 mW. The Viterbi decoder presented here can be applied to next generation wide-band code division multiple access (W-CDMA) systems     

An 8 Gb/s/pin 9.6 ns Row-Cycle 288 Mb Deca-Data Rate SDRAM With an I/O Error Detection Scheme

This paper proposes a deca-data rate clocking scheme and relevant I/O circuit techniques for a multi-Gb/s/pin memory interface. A deca-data rate scheme transmits 10 bits in one external clock cycle to transfer an error control code along with original data seamlessly without a timing bubble. A 288 Mb SDRAM has been designed using the proposed scheme combined with fast cycling core techniques to have both high I/O bandwidth and fast random cycling. Measured results show that the chip exhibits per-pin data rate of 8 Gb/s and row cycle time of 9.6 ns     

10 gbit/s 0.0065 mm2 6 mw analogue adaptive equaliser utilising negative capacitance

An area- and power-efficient analogue adaptive equaliser (AEQ) is realised in a 0.13 μm CMOS technology. The negative capacitance circuits are exploited at the equalisation filter to achieve wider bandwidth and larger high-frequency boosting, instead of using passive inductors that lead to a large chip area. Measured results demonstrate the data rate of 10 Gbit/s for 20 and 34 inch FR4 traces as channels, while dissipating only 6 mW from a single 1.2 V supply. The chip core occupies an extremely small area of 50 x 130 μm². To the best of the authors' knowledge, this chip achieves the lowest power consumption and the smallest chip area among the recently reported AEQs.     

A 64-Mbit, 640-MByte/s bidirectional data strobed, double-data-rateSDRAM with a 40-mW DLL for a 256-MByte memory system

A 64-Mbit bidirectional data strobed, double-data-rate SDRAM achieves a peak bandwidth of 2.56 GByte/s on a 64-bit-channel, 256-MByte memory system at V_cc=3.3 V and T=25°C. The circuit features are: (1) a bidirectional data strobing scheme to eliminate the clock-related skews of I/O data in a multimodule system, (2) a low-power delay-locked loop having a wide range of locking frequency (40-160 MHz) with fast access time and minimal variations, and (3) a twisted data bussing architecture with minimized loading difference between I/O data paths and small chip-size overhead associated with the 2-bit prefetch operation     

A 63-μW standby power microcontroller with on-chip hybridregulator scheme

Presents a 32-b RISC microcontroller having an on-chip dc-dc converter. The chip standby power including the dc-dc converter is reduced to 63 μW with a new hybrid regulator scheme in which the microcontroller selects a switching regulator in active mode and a series regulator in standby mode. The achieved standby power corresponds to only about 1% of the standby power with a conventional scheme which always uses a switching regulator. Off-chip power transistor-type configuration suppresses pin-count increase caused by implementing an on-chip switching regulator. A series regulator that could be used instead of the switching regulator in active mode was also implemented on the chip. The series regulator does not impact the chip size because it is divided and inserted into I/O area that was originally left unused     

A Hybrid Audio ΔΣ Modulator with dB‐Linear Gain Control Function

A hybrid ΔΣ modulator for audio applications is presented in this paper. The pulse generator for digital‐to‐analog converter alleviates the requirement of the external clock jitter and calibrates the coefficient variation due to a process shift and temperature changes. The input resistor network in the first integrator offers a gain control function in a dB‐linear fashion. Also, careful chopper stabilization implementation using return‐to‐zero scheme in the first continuous‐time integrator minimizes both the influence of flicker noise and inflow noise due to chopping. The chip is implemented in a 0.13 μm CMOS technology (I/O devices) and occupies an active area of 0.37 mm². The ΔΣ modulator achieves a dynamic range (A‐weighted) of 97.8 dB and a peak signal‐to‐noise‐plus‐distortion ratio of 90.0 dB over an audio bandwidth of 20 kHz with a 4.4 mW power consumption from 3.3 V. Also, the gain of the modulator is controlled from –9.5 dB to 8.5 dB, and the performance of the modulator is maintained up to 5 ns_RMS external clock jitter.     

A 90 nm CMOS 16 Gb/s Transceiver for Optical Interconnects

Interconnect architectures which leverage high-bandwidth optical channels offer a promising solution to address the increasing chip-to-chip I/O bandwidth demands. This paper describes a dense, high-speed, and low-power CMOS optical interconnect transceiver architecture. Vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) data rate is extended for a given average current and corresponding reliability level with a four-tap current summing FIR transmitter. A low-voltage integrating and double-sampling optical receiver front-end provides adequate sensitivity in a power efficient manner by avoiding linear high-gain elements common in conventional transimpedance-amplifier (TIA) receivers. Clock recovery is performed with a dual-loop architecture which employs baud-rate phase detection and feedback interpolation to achieve reduced power consumption, while high-precision phase spacing is ensured at both the transmitter and receiver through adjustable delay clock buffers. A prototype chip fabricated in 1 V 90 nm CMOS achieves 16 Gb/s operation while consuming 129 mW and occupying 0.105 mm².     

Dual-band RF receiver for GPS-L1 and compass-B1 in a 55-nm CMOS

A fully integrated dual-band RF receiver with a low-IF architecture is designed and implemented for GPS-L 1 and Compass-Bl in a 55-nm CMOS process. The receiver incorporates two independent IF channels with 2 or 4 MHz bandwidth to receive dual-band signals around 1.57 GHz respectively. By implementing a flexible frequency plan, the RF front-end and frequency synthesizer are shared for the dual-band operation to save power consumption and chip area, as well as avoiding LO crosstalk. A digital automatic gain control （AGC） loop is utilized to improve the receiver＇s robustness by optimizing the conversion gain of the analog-to-digital converter （ADC）. While drawing about 20 mA per channel from a 1.2 V supply, this RF receiver achieves a minimum noise figure （NF） of about 1.8 dB, an image rejection （IMR） of more than 35 dB, a maximum voltage gain of about 122 dB, a gain dynamic range of 82 dB, and an maximum input-referred 1 dB compression point of about -36.5 dBm with an active die area of 1.5 × 1.4 mm2 for the whole chip.     

A 10-Gb/s CML I/O Circuit for Backplane Interconnection in 0.18-$mu$m CMOS Technology

A 10-Gb/s current mode logic (CML) input/output (I/O) circuit for backplane interconnect is fabricated in 0.18-mu m 1P6M CMOS process. Comparing with conventional I/O circuit, this work consists of input equalizer, limiting amplifier with active-load inductive peaking, duty cycle correction and CML output buffer. To enhance circuit bandwidth for 10-GB/s operation, several techniques include active load inductive peaking and active feedback with current buffer in Cherry-Hooper topology. With these techniques, it reduces 30%-65% of the chip area comparing with on-chip inductor peaking method. This design also passes the interoperability test with switch fabric successfully. It provides 600- mV_pp differential voltage swing in driving 50-Omega output loads, 40-dB input dynamic range, 40-dB voltage gain, and 8-mV input sensitivity. The total power consumption is only 85 mW in 1.8-V supply and the chip feature die size is 700 mum times 400 mum.     

Low-power area-efficient high-speed I/O circuit techniques

We present a 4-Gb/s I/O circuit that fits in 0.1-mm² of die area, dissipates 90 mW of power, and operates over 1 m of 7-mil 0.5-oz PCB trace in a 0.25-μm CMOS technology. Swing reduction is used in an input-multiplexed transmitter to provide most of the speed advantage of an output-multiplexed architecture with significantly lower power and area. A delay-locked loop (DLL) using a supply-regulated inverter delay line gives very low jitter at a fraction of the power of a source-coupled delay line-based DLL. Receiver capacitive offset trimming decreases the minimum resolvable swing to 8 mV, greatly reducing the transmission energy without affecting the performance of the receive amplifier. These circuit techniques enable a high level of I/O integration to relieve the pin bandwidth bottleneck of modern VLSI chips     

A 29-ns 64-Mb DRAM with hierarchical array architecture

A 29-ns (RAS access time), 64-Mb DRAM with hierarchical array architecture has been developed. For consistent high yields and high speed, a CMOS segment driver circuit is used as a hierarchical word line scheme. To achieve high speed, precharge signal (PC) drivers for equalizing the bit lines pairs, and shared sense amplifier signal (SHR) drivers are distributed in the array. To enhance sense amplifiers speed in low array voltage, an over driven sense amplifier is adopted. A hierarchical I/O scheme with semidirect sensing switch is introduced for high speed data transfer in the I/O paths. By combining these proposed circuit techniques and 0.25-μm CMOS process technologies with phase-shift optical lithography, an experimental 64-Mb DRAM has been designed and fabricated. The memory cell size is 0.71×1.20 μm ², and the chip size is 15.91×9.06 mm². A typical access time under 3.3 V power supply voltage is 29 ns     

IC设计中的ESD保护技术探讨

ESD是集成电路设计中最重要的可靠性问题之一。IC失效中约有40%与ESD/EOS(电学应力)失效有关。为了设计出高可靠性的IC,解决ESD问题是非常必要的。文中讲述一款芯片ESD版图设计,并且在0.35μm 1P3M 5V CMOS工艺中验证,成功通过HBM-3000V和MM-300V测试。这款芯片的端口可以被分成输入端口、输出端口、电源和地。为了达到人体放电模型(HBM)-3000V和机器放电模型(MM)-300V,首先要设计一个好的ESD保护网络。解决办法是先让ESD的电荷从端口流向电源或地,然后从电源或地流向其他端口。其次,给每种端口设计好的ESD保护电路,最后完成一张ESD保护电路版图。