• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2000.07b
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• pp.587-590
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• 2000

For high-accuracy signal processing of differential capacitance transducers, an interface circuitry based on a switched-capacitor sample/hold circuit is developed. Driven by nonoverlapping two-phase clocks, the interface produces the output voltage which is proportional to the ratio of difference-to-sum of two capacitors of a differential transducer. Performances of a prototype chip fabricated using 0.6 $\mu\textrm{m}$ n-well CMOS process were measured and compared with those simulated by HSPICE. The measured results indicate that 0.1% resolution is achievable with the proposed interface and the temperature-dependence of the interface is small enough fur practical applications.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.349-355
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• 2015

A fully-differential touch-screen sensing architecture is presented to improve noise immunity and also support most multi-touch events minimizing the number of amplifiers and their silicon area. A correlated double sampling function is incorporated to reduce DC offset and low-frequency noises, and a stabilizer circuit is also embedded to minimize inherent transient fluctuations. A prototype of the proposed readout circuit was fabricated in a $0.18{\mu}m$ CMOS process and its differential operation in response to various touch events was experimentally verified. With a 3.3 V supply, the current dissipation was 3.4 mA at normal operation and $140{\mu}A$ in standby mode.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.334-341
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• 2015

This research outlines the design of a HR-TDC (High Resolution Time-to-Digital Converter) for high data rate communication systems using a $0.18{\mu}m$ CMOS process. The coarse-fine architecture has been adopted to improve the resolution of the TDC. A two-stage vernier time amplifier (2S-VTA) was used to amplify the time residue, and the gain of the 2S-VTA was larger than 64. The error during time amplification was compensated using two FTDCs (Fine-TDC) with their outputs. The resolution of the HR-TDC was 0.15 ps with a 12-bit output and the power consumption was 4.32 mW with a 1.8-V supply voltage.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.6-14
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• 2011

This paper presents a high-speed QR decomposition architecture for the multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) receiver based on Givens rotation. Under fast-varying channel, since the inverse matrix calculation has to be performed frequently in MIMO receiver, a high performance and low latency QR decomposition module is highly required. The proposed QR decomposition architecture is composed of Sign-Select Lookahead (SSL) coordinate rotation digital computer (CORDIC). In the SSL-CORDIC, the sign bits, which are computed ahead to select which direction to rotate, are used to select one of the last iteration results, therefore, the data dependencies on the previous iterations are efficiently removed. Our proposed QR decomposition module is implemented using TSMC 0.25 ${\mu}M$ CMOS process. Experimental results show that the proposed QR architecture achieves 34.83% speed-up over the Compact CORDIC based architecture for the 4 ${\times}$ 4 matrix decomposition.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.145-151
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• 2013

In this paper, a low power, small area cyclic time-to-digital converter in All-Digital PLL for DVB-S2 application is presented. Coarse and fine TDC stages in the two-step TDC are shared to reduce the area and the current consumption maintaining the resolution since the area of the TDC is dominant in the ADPLL. It is implemented in a 0.13 ${\mu}m$ CMOS process with a die area of 0.12 $mm^2$. The power consumption is 2.4 mW at a 1.2 V supply voltage. Furthermore, the resolution and input frequency of the TDC are 5 ps and 25 MHz, respectively.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.375-380
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• 2017

A differential current-to-time interval converter is presented for current mode sensors. It consists of a ramp voltage generator, a current mode sensor, a reference current source, two current-tunable Schmitt triggers, a one-shot multivibrator, and two logic gates. The design principle is to apply a ramp voltage to each input of the two current-tunable Schmitt triggers whose threshold voltages are proportional to the drain current values of the current mode sensors. A proposed circuit converts a current change in the ISFET biosensor into its equivalent pulse width change. A prototype circuit built using TSMC 0.18 nm CMOS process exhibit a conversion sensitivity amounting to $726.9{\mu}s/pH$ over pH variation range of 2-12 and a linearity error less than ${\pm}0.05%$.

• Journal of ILASS-Korea
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.9-13
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• 2012

This study investigates experimentally evaporation characteristics of nanofluid droplets containing 50 nm alumina($Al_2O_3$) particles and the wettability changes on a hydrophilic glass surfaces. From the captured digital images by using a CMOS camera and a magnifying lens, we examined the effect of particle concentration on droplet evaporation rate which can be indirectly deduced from the measured droplet volumes varying with time. In particular, with the use of a digital image analysis technique, the present study measured droplet perimeters and the contact angles to study the wetting dynamics during evaporating process. In addition, we compared the measured total evaporation time with theoretically estimated values. It was found that as the volume fractions of nanofluid increased, the total evaporation time and the initial contact angles decreased, while the droplet perimeters increased.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.31 no.3A
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• pp.356-359
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• 2006

A monolithic SiGe HBT variable gain driver amplifier(VGDA) with high dB-linear gain control and high linearity has been developed as a driver amplifier with ground-shielded microstrip lines for 5-GHz transmitters. The VGDA consists of three blocks such as the cascode gain-control stage, fixed-gain output stage, and voltage control block. The circuit elements were optimized by using the Agilent Technologies' ADSs. The VGDA was implemented in STMicroelectronics' 0.35${\mu}m$ Si-BiCMOS process. The VGDA exhibits a dynamic gain control range of 34 dB with the control voltage range from 0 to 2.3 V in 5.15-5.35 GHz band. At 5.15 GHz, maximum gain and attenuation are 10.5 dB and -23.6 dB, respectively. The amplifier also produces a 1-dB gain-compression output power of -3 dBm and output third-order intercept point of 7.5 dBm. Input/output voltage standing wave ratios of the VGDA keep low and constant despite change in the gain-control voltage.

• Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Materials
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.173-179
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• 2006

Due to the limitations of the channel length, the lateral spread for two-dimensional impurity distributions is critical for the analysis of devices including the integrated complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) circuits and high frequency semiconductor devices. The developed codes were then compared with the two-dimensional implanted profiles measured by transmission electron microscope (TEM) as well as simulated by a commercial TSUPREM4 for verification purposes. The measured two-dimensional TEM data obtained by chemical etching-method was consistent with the results of the developed analytical model, and it seemed to be more accurate than the results attained by a commercial TSUPREM4. The developed codes can be applied on a wider energy range $(1KeV{\sim}30MeV)$ than a commercial TSUPREM4 of which the maximum energy range cannot exceed 1MeV for the limited doping elements. Moreover, it is not only limited to diffusion process but also can be applied to implantation due to the sloped and nano scale structure of the mask.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.60 no.2
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• pp.315-319
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• 2011

A switched-capacitor cyclic DAC scheme with mismatch compensation of capacitors is designed. In cyclic DAC, a little error between two capacitors is accumulated every cycle. As a result, the accumulated error influences the final analog output which is wrong data. Therefore, a mismatch compensation technique was proposed and the error can be effectively reduced, which alleviates the matching requirement. In order to verify the operation of the proposed DAC, an 8-bit switched-capacitor cyclic DAC is designed through HSPICE simulation and implemented through magna 0.18um standard CMOS process.