• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
• /
• 제12권2호
• /
• pp.168-174
• /
• 2012

This paper describes a novel global on-chip interconnect scheme, in which a one UI-delayed symbol as well as the current symbol is sent for easing the sensing operation at receiver end. With this approach, the voltage swing on the channel for reliable sensing can be reduced, resulting in performance improvement in terms of power consumption, peak current, and delay spread due to PVT variations, as compared to the conventional repeater insertion schemes. Evaluation for on-chip interconnects having various lengths in a 130 nm CMOS process indicated that the proposed on-chip interconnect scheme achieved a power reduction of up to 71.3%. The peak current during data transmission and the delay spread due to PVT variations were also reduced by as much as 52.1% and 65.3%, respectively.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
• /
• 제15권1호
• /
• pp.77-84
• /
• 2015

This paper presents the design of a low-power, low area 256-radix 16-bit crossbar switch employing a 2D Hyper-X network topology. The Hyper-X crossbar switch realizes the high radix of 256 by hierarchically combining a set of 4-radix sub-switches and applies three modifications to the basic Hyper-X topology in order to mitigate the adverse scaling of power consumption and propagation delay with the increasing radix. For instance, by restricting the directions in which signals can be routed, by restricting the ports to which signals can be connected, and by replacing the column-wise routes with diagonal routes, the fanout of each circuit node can be substantially reduced from 256 to 4~8. The proposed 256-radix, 16-bit crossbar switch is designed in a 65 nm CMOS and occupies the total area of $0.93{\times}1.25mm^2$. The simulated worst-case delay and power dissipation are 641 ps and 13.01 W when operating at a 1.2 V supply and 1 GHz frequency. In comparison with the state-of-the-art designs, the proposed crossbar switch design achieves the best energy-delay efficiency of $2.203cycle/ns{\cdot}fJ{\cdot}{\lambda}2$.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
• /
• 제10권3호
• /
• pp.165-175
• /
• 2010

This paper presents a fine-grain supply-voltage-control scheme for low-power FPGAs. The proposed supply-voltage-control scheme detects the critical path in real time with small overheads by exploiting features of asynchronous architectures. In an FPGA based on the proposed supply-voltage-control scheme, logic blocks on the sub-critical path are autonomously switched to a lower supply voltage to reduce the power consumption without system performance degradation. Moreover, in order to reduce the overheads of level shifters used at the power domain interface, a look-up-table without level shifters is employed. Because of the small overheads of the proposed supply-voltage-control scheme and the power domain interface, the granularity size of the power domain in the proposed FPGA is as fine as a single four-input logic block. The proposed FPGA is fabricated using the e-Shuttle 65 nm CMOS process. Correct operation of the proposed FPGA on the test chip is confirmed.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
• /
• 제15권1호
• /
• pp.62-71
• /
• 2017

This paper presents a low-power voltage converter based on a reconfigurable capacitor array. Its energy recycling capacitor array stores the energy during a charge stage and supplies the voltage during an energy recycle stage even after the power source is disconnected. The converter reconfigures the capacitor array step-wise to boost the lost voltage level during the energy recycle stage. Its energy saving is particularly effective when most of the energy remaining in the charge capacitors is wasted by the leakage current during a longer sleep period. Simulations have been conducted using a voltage source of 500 mV to supply a $V_{DD}$ of around 800 mV to a load circuit consisting of four 32-bit adders in a 65-nm CMOS process. Results demonstrate energy recycling efficiency of 85.86% and overall energy saving of 40.14% compared to a conventional converter, when the load circuit is shortly active followed by a long sleep period.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
• /
• 제13권3호
• /
• pp.185-192
• /
• 2013

In this paper, a clock and data recovery (CDR) circuit that supports triple data rates of 1.62, 2.7, and 5.4 Gbps for DisplayPort 1.2 standard is described. The proposed CDR circuit covers three different operating frequencies with a single VCO switching the operating frequency by the 3-bit digital code. The prototype chip has been designed and verified using a 65 nm CMOS technology. The recovered-clock jitter with the data rates of 1.62/2.7/5.4 Gbps at $2^{31}$-1 PRBS is measured to 7/5.6/4.7 $ps_{rms}$, respectively, while consuming 11 mW from a 1.2 V supply.

• ETRI Journal
• /
• 제39권3호
• /
• pp.373-382
• /
• 2017

A new internally compensated low drop-out voltage regulator based on the cascoded flipped voltage follower is presented in this paper. Adaptive biasing current and fast charging/discharging paths have been added to rapidly charge and discharge the parasitic capacitance of the pass transistor gate, thus improving the transient response. The proposed regulator was designed with standard 65-nm CMOS technology. Measurements show load and line regulations of $433.80{\mu}V/mA$ and 5.61 mV/V, respectively. Furthermore, the output voltage spikes are kept under 76 mV for 0.1 mA to 100 mA load variations and 0.9 V to 1.2 V line variations with rise and fall times of $1{\mu}s$. The total current consumption is $17.88{\mu}V/mA$ (for a 0.9 V supply voltage).

• ETRI Journal
• /
• 제39권3호
• /
• pp.326-335
• /
• 2017

In the uplink transmission of massive (or large-scale) multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems, large dimensional signal detection and its hardware design are challenging issues owing to the high computational complexity. In this paper, we propose low-complexity hardware architectures of Richardson iterative method-based massive MIMO detectors. We present two types of massive MIMO detectors, directly mapped (type1) and reformulated (type2) Richardson iterative methods. In the proposed Richardson method (type2), the matrix-by-matrix multiplications are reformulated to matrix-vector multiplications, thus reducing the computational complexity from $O(U^2)$ to O(U). Both massive MIMO detectors are implemented using a 65 nm CMOS process and compared in terms of detection performance under different channel conditions (high-mobility and flat fading channels). The hardware implementation results confirm that the proposed type1 Richardson method-based detector demonstrates up to 50% power savings over the proposed type2 detector under a flat fading channel. The type2 detector indicates a 37% power savings compared to the type1 under a high-mobility channel.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
• /
• 제15권2호
• /
• pp.255-266
• /
• 2015

In this paper, a low-complexity and low-power soft output multiple input multiple output (MIMO) symbol detector is proposed for mobile devices with two transmit and two receive antennas. The proposed symbol detector can support both the spatial multiplexing mode and spatial diversity mode in single hardware and shows the optimal maximum likelihood (ML) performance. By applying a multi-stage pipeline structure and using a complex multiplier based on the polar-coordinate, the complexity of the proposed architecture is dramatically decreased. Also, by applying a clock-gating scheme to the internal modules for MIMO modes, the power consumption is also reduced. The proposed symbol detector was designed using a hardware description language (HDL) and implemented using a 65nm CMOS standard cell library. With the proposed architecture, the proposed MIMO detector takes up an area of approximately $0.31mm^2$ with 183K equivalent gates and achieves a 150Mbps throughput. Also, the power estimation results show that the proposed MIMO detector can reduce the power consumption by a maximum of 85% for the various test cases.

• 한국진공학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 한국진공학회 2012년도 제42회 동계 정기 학술대회 초록집
• /
• pp.317-318
• /
• 2012

현재의 반도체 산업에서 Hafnium oxide와 Hafnium silicates같은 high-k 물질은 CMOS gate와 DRAM capacitor dielectrics로 사용하기 위한 대표적인 물질에 속한다. MOSFET (metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor)구조에서 gate length는 16 nm 이하로 계속 미세화가 연구 중이고, 또한 gate는 기존구조에서 Multi-gate구조로 다변화가 일어나고 있다. 이를 통해 게이트 절연막은 그 구조와 활용범위가 다양해지게 될 것이다. 동시에 leakage current와 dielectric break-down을 감소시키는 연구가 중요해지고 있다. 그러나 나노 영역에서의 기계적 특성에 대한 연구는 전무한 상태이다. 따라서 복잡한 회로 공정, 다양한 Multi-gate 구조, 신뢰도의 향상을 위해서는 유전박막 물질자체와 계면에서의 물리적, 기계적인 특징의 측정이 상당히 중요해지고 있다. 이에 본 연구는 Nano-indenter의 통해 경도(Hardness)와 탄성계수(Elastic modulus) 등의 측정을 통하여 시료 표면의 나노영역에서의 기계적 특성을 연구하고자 하였다. $HfO_2$게이트 절연막은 rf magnetron sputter를 이용해 Si (silicon) (100)기판위에 박막형태로 증착하였고, 이후 furnace에서 질소분위기로 온도(400, 450, $500^{\circ}C$)를 달리하여 20분 열처리를 하였다. 또한 Weibull distribution을 이용해 박막의 characteristic value를 계산하였으며, 실험결과 열처리 온도가 $400^{\circ}C$에서 $500^{\circ}C$로 증가함에 따라 경도와 탄성계수는 7.4 GPa에서 10.65 GPa으로 120.25 GPa에서 137.95 GPa으로 각각 증가하였다. 이는 재료적 측면으로 재료의 구조적 우수성이 증가된 것으로 판단된다.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
• /
• 제16권4호
• /
• pp.387-394
• /
• 2016

This paper presents a fully digital delay locked loop (DLL) that can acquire lock in four clock cycles with a resolution of a 1/4 NAND-delay. The proposed DLL with a multi-dither-free phase detector acquires the initial lock in four clock cycles with 1/2 NAND-delay. Then, it utilizes a multi-dither-free phase detector, a region accumulator, and phase blenders, to improve the resolution to a 1/4 NAND-delay. The region accumulator which continuously steers the control registers and the phase blender, adaptively controls the tracking bandwidth depending on the amount of jitter, and effectively suppresses the dithering jitter. Fabricated in a 65 nm CMOS process, the proposed DLL occupies $0.0432mm^2$, and consumes 3.7 mW from a 1.2-V supply at 2 GHz.