• ETRI Journal
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• v.39 no.5
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• pp.746-755
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• 2017

In this paper, an electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection circuit is designed for use as a 12 V power clamp by using a parasitic-diode-triggered silicon controlled rectifier. The breakdown voltage and trigger voltage ($V_t$) of the proposed ESD protection circuit are improved by varying the length between the n-well and the p-well, and by adding $n^+/p^+$ floating regions. Moreover, the holding voltage ($V_h$) is improved by using segmented technology. The proposed circuit was fabricated using a $0.18-{\mu}m$ bipolar-CMOS-DMOS process with a width of $100{\mu}m$. The electrical characteristics and robustness of the proposed ESD circuit were analyzed using transmission line pulse measurements and an ESD pulse generator. The electrical characteristics of the proposed circuit were also analyzed at high temperature (300 K to 500 K) to verify thermal performance. After optimization, the $V_t$ of the proposed circuit increased from 14 V to 27.8 V, and $V_h$ increased from 5.3 V to 13.6 V. The proposed circuit exhibited good robustness characteristics, enduring human-body-model surges at 7.4 kV and machine-model surges at 450 V.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.49 no.2
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• pp.47-55
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• 2012

A discrete-time(DT) filter with high-order temporal moving average(TMA) using actively-weighted charge sampling is proposed in this paper. To obtain different weight of sampled charge, the variable transconductance OTA is used prior to charge sampler, and the ratio of charge can be effectively weighted by switching the control transistors in the OTA. As a result, high-order TMA operation can be possible by actively-weighted charge sampling. In addition, the transconductance generated by the OTA is relatively accurate and stable by using the size ratio of the control transistors. The high-order TMA filter has small size, increased voltage gain, and low parasitic effects due to the small amount of switches and sampling capacitors. It is implemented in the TSMC $0.18-{\mu}m$ CMOS process by TMA-$2^2$. The simulated voltage gain is about 16.7 dB, and P1dB and IIP3 are -32.5 dBm and -23.7 dBm, respectively. DC current consumption is about 9.7 mA.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.93-98
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• 2018

In this paper, an energy-efficient 11.49-bit successive approximation register (SAR) capacitance-to-digital converter (CDC) for capacitive sensors with a figure of merit (FoM) of 31.6 pJ/conversion-step is presented. The CDC employs a SAR algorithm to obtain low power consumption and a simplified structure. The proposed circuit uses a capacitive sensing amplifier (CSA) and a dynamic latch comparator to achieve parasitic capacitance-insensitive operation. The CSA adopts a correlated double sampling (CDS) technique to reduce flicker (1/f) noise to achieve low-noise characteristics. The SAR algorithm is implemented in dual operating mode, using an 8-bit coarse programmable capacitor array in the capacitance-domain and an 8-bit R-2R digital-to-analog converter (DAC) in the charge-domain. The proposed CDC achieves a wide input capacitance range of 29.4 pF and a high resolution of 0.449 fF. The CDC is fabricated in a $0.18-{\mu}m$ 1P6M complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process with an active area of 0.55 mm2. The total power consumption of the CDC is $86.4{\mu}W$ with a 1.8-V supply. The SAR CDC achieves a measured 11.49-bit resolution within a conversion time of 1.025 ms and an energy-efficiency FoM of 31.6 pJ/step.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.38 no.4
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• pp.654-664
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• 2016

This paper presents a transformer-based reconfigurable synchronous boost converter. The lowest maximum power point tracking (MPPT)-input voltage and peak efficiency of the proposed boost converter, 20 mV and 88%, respectively, were achieved using a reconfigurable synchronous structure, static power loss minimization design, and efficiency boost mode change (EBMC) method. The proposed reconfigurable synchronous structure for high efficiency enables both a transformer-based self-startup mode (TSM) and an inductor-based MPPT mode (IMM) with a power PMOS switch instead of a diode. In addition, a static power loss minimization design, which was developed to reduce the leakage current of the native switch and quiescent current of the control blocks, enables a low input operation voltage. Furthermore, the proposed EBMC method is able to change the TSM into IMM with no additional time or energy loss. A prototype chip was implemented using a $0.18-{\mu}m$ CMOS process, and operates within an input voltage range of 9 mV to 1 V, and an output voltage range of 1 V to 3.3 V, and provides a maximum output power of 37 mW.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.2441-2446
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• 2018

This paper presents a radio frequency-to-direct current (RF-to-DC) converter for special RF power harvesting application at 915 MHz. The major featured components of the proposed RF-to-DC converter is the combination of a cross-coupled rectifier and an active diode: first, the cross-coupled rectifier boosts the input voltage to desired level, and an active diode blocks the reverse current, respectively. A prototype was implemented using $0.18{\mu}m$ CMOS technology, and the performance was proven from the fact that the targeted RF harvesting system's full-operation with higher power efficiency; even if the system's input power gets lower (e.g., from nominal 0 to min. -12 dBm), the proposed RF-to-DC converter constantly provides 1.47 V, which is exactly the voltage level to drive follow up system components like DC-to-DC converter and so on. And, maximum power conversion efficiency is 82 % calculated from the 0 dBm input power, 2.3 mA load current.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.318-330
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• 2013

This paper presents a high-linearity low-noise small-size programmable gain amplifier (PGA) based on a new low-noise low-distortion differential amplifier and a proposed reconfiguration technique. The proposed differential amplifier combines an inverter-based differential pair with an adaptive biasing circuit to reduce noise and distortion. The reconfiguration technique saves the chip size by half by utilizing the same differential pair for the input transconductance and load-stage, interchangeably. Fabricated in $0.18-{\mu}m$ CMOS, the proposed PGA shows a dB-linear control range of 21dB in 16 steps from -11 dB to 10 dB with a gain error of less than ${\pm}0.33$ dB, an IIP3 of 7.4~14.5 dBm, a P1dB of -7~1.2 dBm, a noise figure of 13dB, and a 3-dB bandwidth of 270MHz at the maximum gain, respectively. The PGA occupies a chip area of $0.04mm^2$ and consumes only 1.3 mA from the 1.8 V supply.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.291-296
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• 2015

This paper describes the design of a high-speed comparator for high-speed automatic test equipment (ATE). The normal comparator block, which compares the detected signal from the device under test (DUT) to the reference signal from an internal digital-to-analog converter (DAC), is composed of a rail-to-rail first pre-amplifier, a hysteresis amplifier, and a third pre-amplifier and latch for high-speed operation. The proposed continuous comparator handles high-frequency signals up to 800MHz and a wide range of input signals (0~5V). Also, to compare the differences of both common signals and differential signals between two DUTs, the proposed differential mode comparator exploits one differential difference amplifier (DDA) as a pre-amplifier in the comparator, while a conventional differential comparator uses three op-amps as a pre-amplifier. The chip was implemented with $0.18{\mu}m$ Bipolar CMOS DEMOS (BCDMOS) technology, can compare signal differences of 5mV, and operates in a frequency range up to 800MHz. The chip area is $0.514mm^2$.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.41 no.11
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• pp.1566-1573
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• 2016

This paper presents a beam-forming receiver with polyphase In-phase/Quadrature-phase (I/Q) network for airborne communication. In beam-forming receiver, the insertion loss (IL) difference between input path increases the receiver noise figure (NF). The major element for generating IL difference is the impedance variation of phase shifter. In order to maintain a constant IL in every phase, this paper propose a lossless polyphase I/Q network based beam-forming receiver. The proposed lossless polyphase I/Q network has low Q-factor and high impedance for drive back-end VGA (Variable gain amplifier) block with low insertion loss. The 2-stage VGA controls in-phase and quadrature-phase amplitude level for vector summation. The proposed beam-forming receiver prototype is fabricated in TSMC $0.18{\mu}m$ CMOS process. The prototype cover the $360^{\circ}$ with $5.6^{\circ}$ LSB. The average RMS phase error and amplitude error is approximately $1.6^{\circ}$ and 0.3dB.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.48 no.1
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• pp.22-30
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• 2011

In this paper, we propose a memory efficient multi-rate Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) decoder for China Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting (CMMB). We find the best trade-off between the performance and the circuit area by designing a partially parallel decoder which is capable of passing multiple messages in parallel. By designing an efficient address generation unit (AGU) with an index matrix, we could reduce both the amount of memory requirement and the complexity of computation. The proposed regular LDPC decoder was designed in Verilog HDL and was synthesized by Synopsys' Design Compiler using Chartered $0.18{\mu}m$ CMOS cell library. The synthesized design has the gate size of 455K (in NAND2). For the two code rates supported by CMMB, the rate-1/2 decoder has a throughput of 14.32 Mbps, and the rate-3/4 decoder has a throughput of 26.97 Mbps. Compared with a conventional LDPC for CMMB, our proposed design requires only 0.39% of the memory.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.38-45
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• 2018

An integrated cryptographic processor that efficiently integrates ARIA, AES block ciphers and Whirlpool hash function into a single hardware architecture is described. Based on the algorithm characteristics of ARIA, AES, and Whirlpool, we optimized the design so that the hardware resources of the substitution layer and the diffusion layer were shared. The round block was designed to operate in a time-division manner for the round transformation and the round key expansion of the Whirlpool hash, resulting in a lightweight hardware implementation. The hardware operation of the integrated ARIA-AES-Whirlpool crypto-processor was verified by Virtex5 FPGA implementation, and it occupied 68,531 gate equivalents (GEs) with a 0.18um CMOS cell library. When operating at 80 MHz clock frequency, it was estimated that the throughputs of ARIA, AES block ciphers, and Whirlpool hash were 602~787 Mbps, 682~930 Mbps, and 512 Mbps, respectively.