Development of 0.50μm CMOS Integrated Circuits Technology

Submicron CMOS IC technology, including triple layer resist lithography technology, RIE, LDD, Titanium Salicide, shallow junction, thin gate oxide, no bird's beak isolation and channel's multiple implantation doping technology have been developed. 0.50μm. CMOS integrated circuits have been fabricated using this submicron CMOS process.

Double-ended passivator enables dark-current-suppressed colloidal quantum dot photodiodes for CMOS-integrated infrared imagers

Lead sulfide(PbS)colloidal quantum dot(CQD)photodiodes integrated with silicon-based readout integrated circuits(ROICs)offer a promising solution for the next-generation short-wave infrared(SWIR)imaging technology.Despite their potential,large-size CQD photodiodes pose a challenge due to high dark currents resulting from surface states on nonpassivated(100)facets and trap states generated by CQD fusion.In this work,we present a novel approach to address this issue by introducing double-ended ligands that supplementally passivate(100)facets of halidecapped large-size CQDs,leading to suppressed bandtail states and reduced defect concentration.Our results demonstrate that the dark current density is highly suppressed by about an order of magnitude to 9.6 nA cm^(2) at -10 mV,which is among the lowest reported for PbS CQD photodiodes.Furthermore,the performance of the photodiodes is exemplary,yielding an external quantum efficiency of 50.8%(which corresponds to a responsivity of 0.532 A W^(-1))and a specific detectivity of 2.5×10^(12) Jones at 1300 nm.By integrating CQD photodiodes with CMOS ROICs,the CQD imager provides high-resolution(640×512)SWIR imaging for infrared penetration and material discrimination.

Novel High PSRR Current Reference Based on Subthreshold MOSFETs

This paper takes full advantages of the I-V transconductance characteristics of metal-oxide semiconductor field effect transistor （MOSFET） operating in the subthreshold region and the enhancement pre-regulator technique with the high gain negative feedback loop. The proposed reference circuit, designed with the SMIC 0.18 μm standard complementary metal-oxide semiconductor （CMOS） logic process technology, exhibits a stable current of about 1.701 μA with much low temperature coefficient （TC） of 2.5×10^-4μA/℃ in the temperature range of-40 to 150℃ at 1.5 V supply voltage, and also achieves a best PSRR over a broad frequency. The PSRR is about - 126 dB at DC frequency and remains -92 dB at the frequency higher 100 MHz. Moreover the proposed reference circuit operates stably at the supply voltage higher 1.2 V and has good process compatibility.

CMOS vision sensor with fully digital image process integrated into low power 1/8-inch chip

A digital still camera image processing system on a chip, different from the video camera system, is pre- sented for mobile phone to reduce the power consumption and size. A new color interpolation algorithm is proposed to enhance the image quality. The system can also process fixed patten noise （FPN） reduction, color correction, gamma correction, RGB/YUV space transfer, etc. The chip is controlled by sensor regis- ters by inter-integrated circuit （I2C） interface. The voltage for both the front-end analog and the pad cir- cuits is 2.8 V, and the volatge for the image signal processing is 1.8 V. The chip running under the external 13.5-MHz clock has a video data rate of 30 frames/s and the measured power dissipation is about 75 roW.

Low-Power CMOS VCO with Dual-Band Local Oscillating Signal Outputs for 5/2.5-GHz WLAN Transceivers

The paper describes a low-power CMOS voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) with dual-band local oscillating (LO) signal outputs for 5/2.5-GHz wireless local area network (WLAN) transceivers. The VCO is based on an on-chip symmetrical spiral inductor and a differential varactor. The 2.5-GHz quadrature LO signals are generated using the injection-locked frequency divider (ILFD) technique. The ILFD structure is similar to the VCO structure with its wide tracking range. The design tool ASITIC was used to optimize all on-chip symmetrical inductors. The power consumption was kept low with differential LC tanks and the ILFD technique. The circuit was implemented in a 0.18-μm CMOS process. Hspice and SpectreRF simulations show the proposed circuit could generate low phase noise 5/2.5-GHz dual band LO signals with a wide tuning range. The 2.5-GHz LO signals are quadrature with almost no phase and amplitude errors. The circuit consumes less than 5.3 mW in the tuning range with a power supply voltage of 1.5 V. The die area is only 1.0 mm×1.0 mm.

Low threshold voltage light-emitting diode in silicon-based standard CMOS technology

Low-voltage silicon （Si）-based light-emitting diode （LED） is designed based on the former research of LED in Si-based standard complementary metal oxide semiconductor （CMOS） technology. The low-voltage LED is designed under the research of cross-finger structure LEDs and sophisticated structure enhanced LEDs for high efficiency and stable light source of monolithic chip integration. The device size of low-voltage LED is 45.85x38.4 （#m）, threshold voltage is 2.2 V in common condition, and temperature is 27 ~C. The external quantum efficiency is about 10-6 at stable operating state of 5 V and 177 mA.

A high performance 90 nm CMOS SAR ADC with hybrid architecture

A 10-bit 2.5 MS/s SAR A/D converter is presented. In the circuit design, an R-C hybrid architecture D/A converter, pseudo-differential comparison architecture and low power voltage level shiflers are utilized. Design challenges and considerations are also discussed. In the layout design, each unit resistor is sided by dummies for good matching performance, and the capacitors are routed with a common-central symmetry method to reduce the nonlinearity error. This proposed converter is implemented based on 90 nm CMOS logic process. With a 3.3 V analog supply and a 1.0 V digital supply, the differential and integral nonlinearity are measured to be less than 0.36 LSB and 0.69 LSB respectively. With an input frequency of 1.2 MHz at 2.5 MS/s sampling rate, the SFDR and ENOB are measured to be 72.86 dB and 9.43 bits respectively, and the power dissipation is measured to be 6.62 mW including the output drivers. This SAR A/D converter occupies an area of 238× 214 μm^2. The design results of this converter show that it is suitable for multi-supply embedded SoC applications.

All-CMOS temperature compensated current reference

This paper presents a novel temperature independent current reference based on the theory of mutual compensation of mobility and threshold voltage.It is completely compatible with standard CMOS-technology.The experiment results indicate that the temperature coefficient of this current reference is less than 290 ppm/℃over a temperature range from-20 to 110℃.

A 10-bit low power SAR A/D converter based on 90 nm CMOS

Traditional and some recently reported low power,high speed and high resolution approaches for SAR A/D converters are discussed.Based on SMIC 65 nm CMOS technology,two typical low power methods reported in previous works are validated by circuit design and simulation.Design challenges and considerations for high speed SAR A/D converters are presented.Moreover,an R–C combination based method is also addressed and a 10-bit SAR A/D converter with this approach is implemented in SMIC 90 nm CMOS process.The DNL and INL are measured to be less than 0.31 LSB and 0.59 LSB respectively.With an input frequency of 420 kHz at 1 MS/s sampling rate, the SFDR and ENOB are measured to be 67.6 dB and 9.46 bits respectively,and the power dissipation is measured to be just 3.17 mW.

8.64-11.62 GHz CMOS VCO and divider in a zero-IF 802.11a/b/g WLAN and Bluetooth application

A fully integrated VCO and divider implemented in SMIC 0.13μm RFCMOS 1P8M technology with a 1.2 V supply voltage is presented. The frequency of the VCO is tuning from 8.64 to 11.62 GHz while the quadrature LO signals for 802.1 1 a WLAN in 5.8 GHz band or for 802.1 1b/g WLAN and Bluetooth in 2.4 GHz band can be obtained by a frequency division by 2 or 4, respectively. A 6 bit switched capacitor array is applied for precise tuning of all necessary frequency bands. The testing results show that the VCO has a phase noise of-113 dBc @ 1 MHz offset from the cartier of 5.5 GHz by dividing VCO output by two and the VCO core consumes 3.72 mW. The figure-of-merit for the tuning-range （FOMT） of the VCO is -192.6 dBc/Hz.

CMOS implementation of a low-power BPSK demodulator for wireless implantable neural command transmission

A new BPSK demodulator was presented.By using a clock multiplier with very simple circuit structure to replace the analog multiplier in the traditional BPSK demodulator,the circuit structure of the demodulator became simpler and hence its power consumption became lower.Simpler structure and lower power will make the designed demodulator more suitable for use in an internal single chip design for a wireless implantable neural recording system.The proposed BPSK demodulator was implemented by Global Foundries 0.35μm CMOS technology with a 3.3 V power supply.The designed chip area is only 0.07 mm;and the power consumption is 0.5 mW.The test results show that it can work correctly.

Accurate metamodels of device parameters and their applications in performance modeling and optimization of analog integrated circuits

Techniques for constructing metamodels of device parameters at BSIM3v3 level accuracy are presented to improve knowledge-based circuit sizing optimization. Based on the analysis of the prediction error of analytical performance expressions, operating point driven （OPD） metamodels of MOSFETs are introduced to capture the circuit＇s characteristics precisely. In the algorithm of metamodel construction, radial basis functions are adopted to interpolate the scattered multivariate data obtained from a well tailored data sampling scheme designed for MOSFETs. The OPD metamodels can be used to automatically bias the circuit at a specific DC operating point. Analytical-based performance expressions composed by the OPD metamodels show obvious improvement for most small-signal performances compared with simulation-based models. Both operating-point variables and transistor dimensions can be optimized in our nesting-loop optimization formulation to maximize design flexibility. The method is successfully applied to a low-voltage low-power amplifier.

An investigation of the DC and RF performance of InP DHBTs transferred to RF CMOS wafer substrate

This paper investigated the DC and RF performance of the In P double heterojunction bipolar transistors（DHBTs）transferred to RF CMOS wafer substrate.The measurement results show that the maximum values of the DC current gain of a substrate transferred device had one emitter finger,of 0.8μm in width and 5μm in length,are changed unobviously,while the cut-off frequency and the maximum oscillation frequency are decreased from 220to 171 GHz and from 204 to 154 GHz,respectively.In order to have a detailed insight on the degradation of the RF performance,small-signal models for the In P DHBT before and after substrate transferred are presented and comparably extracted.The extracted results show that the degradation of the RF performance of the device transferred to RF CMOS wafer substrate are mainly caused by the additional introduced substrate parasitics and the increase of the capacitive parasitics induced by the substrate transfer process itself.

A 10-bit 200-kS/s SAR ADC IP core for a touch screen SoC

Based on a 5 MSBs （most-significant-bits）-plus-5 LSBs （least-significant-bits） C-R hybrid D/A conver sion and low-offset pseudo-differential comparison approach, with capacitor array axially symmetric layout topology and resistor string low gradient mismatch placement method, an 8-channel 10-bit 200-kS/s SAR ADC （successiveapproximation-register analog-to-digital converter） IP core for a touch screen SoC （system-on-chip） is implemented in a 0.18 μm 1P5M CMOS logic process. Design considerations for the touch screen SAR ADC are included. With a 1.8 V power supply, the DNL （differential non-linearity） and INL （integral non-linearity） of this converter are measured to be about 0.32 LSB and 0.81 LSB respectively. With an input frequency of 91 kHz at 200-kS/s sampling rate, the spurious-free dynamic range and effective-number-of-bits are measured to be 63.2 dB and 9.15 bits respectively, and the power is about 136 μW. This converter occupies an area of about 0.08 mm^2. The design results show that it is very suitable for touch screen SoC applications.

Reverse current reduction of Ge photodiodes on Si without post-growth annealing

A new approach to reduce the reverse current of Ge pin photodiodes on Si is presented, in which an i-Si layer is inserted between Ge and top Si layers to reduce the electric field in the Ge layer. Without post- growth annealing, the reverse current density is reduced to -10 mA/cm^2 at -1 V, i.e., over one order of magnitude lower than that of the reference photodiode without i-Si layer. However, the responsivity of the photodiodes is not severely compromised. This lowered-reverse-current is explained by band-pinning at the i-Si/i-Ge interface. Barrier lowering mechanism induced by E-field is also discussed. The presented ＂non-thermal＂ approach to reduce reverse current should accelerate electronics-photonics convergence by using Oe on the Si complementary metal oxide semiconductor （CMOS） platform.

Design of compact bi-directional triplexer based on silicon nanowire waveguides

A compact bi-directional （BiDi） triplexer using grating-assisted multimode interference （MMI） coupler is proposed based on silicon nanowire waveguides.Because of the high index contrast between silicon and silicon dioxide, the size of the structure is greatly reduced with a footprint of 2.5×911 （μm）. Asymmetrical ports are introduced in the MMI structure to satisfy the bandwidth requirements of the industrial standards ITU-T G.983.3-dB bandwidths of 100, 22, and 15 nm are obtained for the wavelengths of 1 310, 1 490, and 1 550 nm, respectively. The device can be readily fabricated using a commercial CMOS process.

A 3.8 GHz programmable gain amplifier with a 0.1 dB gain step

A broadband programmable gain amplifier（PGA） with a small gain step and low gain error has been designed in 0.13 m CMOS technology. The PGA was implemented with open-loop architecture to provide wide bandwidth. A two-stage gain control method, which consists of a resistor ladder attenuator and an active fine gain control stage, provides the small gain step. A look-up table based gain control method is introduced in the fine gain control stage to lower the gain error.The proposedPGAshows a decibel-linear variable gainfrom4 to20 dB with a gain step of 0.1 dB and a gain error less than˙0.05 dB. The 3-dB bandwidth and maximum IIP3 are 3.8 GHz and 17 dBm, respectively.

A 10-bit 50-MS/s sample-and-hold circuit with low distortion sampling switches

A fully-differential switched-capacitor sample-and-hold （S/H） circuit used in a 10-bit 50-MS/s pipeline analog-to-digital converter （ADC） was designed and fabricated using a 0.35-μm CMOS process. Capacitor flip-around architecture was used in the S/H circuit to lower the power consumption. In addition, a gain-boosted operational transconductance amplifier （OTA） was designed with a DC gain of 94 dB and a unit gain bandwidth of 460 MHz at a phase margin of 63 degree, which matches the S/H circuit. A novel double-side bootstrapped switch was used, improving the precision of the whole circuit. The measured results have shown that the S/H circuit reaches a spurious free dynamic range （SFDR） of 67 dB and a signal-to-noise ratio （SNR） of 62.1 dB for a 2.5 MHz input signal with 50 MS/s sampling rate. The 0.12mm^2 S/H circuit operates from a 3.3 V supply and consumes 13.6 mW.

A monolithic K-band phase-locked loop for microwave radar application

A monolithic K-band phase-locked loop（PLL） for microwave radar application is proposed and implemented in this paper. By eliminating the tail transistor and using optimized high-Q LC-tank, the proposed voltage-controlled oscillator（VCO） achieves a tuning range of 18.4 to 23.3 GHz and reduced phase noise. Two cascaded current-mode logic（CML） divide-by-two frequency prescalers are implemented to bridge the frequency gap, in which inductor peaking technique is used in the first stage to further boost allowable input frequency.Six-stage TSPC divider chain is used to provide programmable division ratio from 64 to 127, and a second-order passive loop filter with 825 kHz bandwidth is also integrated on-chip to minimize required external components.The proposed PLL needs only approximately 18.2 μs settling time, and achieves a wide tuning range from 18.4 to 23.3 GHz, with a typical output power of –0.84 dBm and phase noise of 91：92 d Bc/Hz @ 1 MHz. The chip is implemented in TSMC 65 nm CMOS process, and occupies an area of 0.56 mm^2 without pads under a 1.2 V single voltage supply.