Analog and mixed-signal design for reconfigurable wireless systems in deep sub-micron CMOS

Dr. Pierluigi Nuzzo
Nomadic Embedded Systems/Wireless Research, IMEC (Interuniversity MicroElectronics Center), Leuven, Belgium

15 hours, 4 credits (final test)

June 3 - June 6, 2008

Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione: Elettronica, Informatica, Telecomunicazioni, via G. Caruso, meeting room, ground floor

Contacts: Ing. Sergio Saponara

Aims

The design of future reconfigurable wireless systems (e.g. software defined radio and cognitive radio) in scaled technologies presents several challenges. Consumer market applications such as telecommunication and multimedia require high performance, compact and energy efficient solutions, including analog and RF components in a single chip. On the other hand, nano-scale physical phenomena in deep sub-micron CMOS technologies make it daunting to guarantee the required performance levels.

This series of lectures survey the innovative solutions that are being investigated and embraced by system and circuit designers to allow smooth integration of complete and reliable systems out of increasingly unreliable components. The lessons address mixed-signal platform-based design as a structured design methodology that provides efficient design space exploration and increased support for design reuse, hence harnessing the increasing complexity of these systems with reduced design iterations and costs.

Several design techniques are further illustrated to enable scalable analog and RF circuits, portable across technology nodes and flexible enough to allow a certain degree of configurability and programmability. Practical state-of-the-art design examples will show the successful applications of the presented concepts.

Outline

1. Modern wireless applications and challenges / The platform based design paradigm (5 hours)

• Motivation. Ambient intelligence. Software defined radio. Cognitive radio. Low power radios for wireless sensor networks.
• The platform based design paradigm and its extension to analog and mixed-signal systems. Robust platform based design.
• Design examples: system-level design of a UMTS front-end; an ultra-wideband receiver platform for low data-rate communication

2. Scalable mixed-signal design / The “digitally-assisted” analog design paradigm (5 hours)

• Analog design scaling challenges in mixed-signal systems-on-chip. Digitally assisted analog design.
• Current trends in baseband design of wireless systems: reconfigurable filters and efficient analog-to-digital converters (ADC).
• Design examples: fully reconfigurable filters for software defined radio; digitfsally assisted pipeline ADC design; power scalable flash and successive approximation (SAR) ADC design.

3. Scalable RF design / The “digital RF” paradigm (5 hours)

• RF design scaling challenges. The “digital-RF” concept.
• Advances in RF design and architectures for software defined radio.
• Design example: frequency synthesizer for software defined radio; all-digital PLL design