• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
• /
• 2014.10a
• /
• pp.585-588
• /
• 2014

This paper presents a self-powered sensor node circuit using photovoltaic and vibration energy harvesting. The harvested energy from a solar cell and a vibration device(PZT) is stored in a storage capacitor. The stored energy is managed by a PMU(Power Management Unit). In order to supply a stable voltage to the sensor node, an LDO(Low Drop Out Regulator) is used. The LDO drives a temperature sensor and a SAR ADC(Successive Approximate Register Analog-to-Digital Converter), and 10-bit digital output data corresponding to current temperature is obtained. The proposed circuit is designed in a 0.35um CMOS process, and the designed chip size including PADs is $1.1mm{\times}0.95mm$.

• Journal of IKEEE
• /
• v.22 no.4
• /
• pp.1012-1018
• /
• 2018

In this paper, CMOS SAR (Successive Approximation Register) A/D converter with 1.8V supply voltage is designed for IoT sensor processing. This paper proposes design of a 12-bit SAR A/D converter with two A / D converters in parallel to improve the sampling rate. A/D converter1 of the two A/D converters determines all the 12-bit bits, and another A/D converter2 uses the upper six bits of the other A/D converters to minimize power consumption and switching energy. Since the second A/D converter2 does not determine the upper 6 bits, the control circuits and SAR Logic are not needed and the area is minimized. In addition, the switching energy increases as the large capacitor capacity and the large voltage change in the C-DAC, and the second A/D converter does not determine the upper 6 bits, thereby reducing the switching energy. It is also possible to reduce the process variation in the C-DAC by proposed structure by the split capacitor capacity in the C-DAC equals the unit capacitor capacity. The proposed SAR A/D converter was designed using 0.18um CMOS process, and the supply voltage of 1.8V, the conversion speed of 10MS/s, and the Effective Number of Bit (ENOB) of 10.2 bits were measured. The area of core block is $600{\times}900um^2$, the total power consumption is $79.58{\mu}W$, and the FOM (Figure of Merit) is 6.716fJ / step.

• Journal of IKEEE
• /
• v.14 no.1
• /
• pp.8-16
• /
• 2010

This paper presents a design of the successive approximation ADC(SA-ADC) applicable to a midium-low speed analog-front end(AFE) for the maximum 15MS/s CCD image processing. SA-ADC is effective in applications ranging widely between low and mid data rates due to the large power scaling effect on the operating frequency variations in some other way of pipelined ADCs. The proposed design exhibits some distinctive features. The "differential capacitor-coupling scheme" segregates the input sampling behavior from the sub-DAC incorporating the differential input and the sub-DAC output, which prominently reduces the loading throughout the signal path. Determining the MSB(sign bit) from the held input data in advance of the data conversion period, a kind of the signed successive approximation, leads to the reduction of the sub-DAC hardware overhead by 1 bit and the conversion period by 1 cycle. Characterizing the proposed design in a 3.3 V $0.35-{\mu}m$ CMOS process by Spectre simulations verified its validity of the application to CCD analog front-ends.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
• /
• v.52 no.3
• /
• pp.59-66
• /
• 2015

In this paper, we propose a method of improving the light-load efficiency of DC-DC buck converter using 4bit SAR-ADC (Successive Approximation ADC) for a LDO or a power transistor size selection technique. The proposed circuit selects power transistor sizes depending on load current so that improves the light-load efficiency of the DC-DC buck converter. For this, we select the power transistor size with a cross point of the switching loss and the conduction loss. Also, when the IC operates in standby mode or sleep mode, a LDO mode is selected for improving the efficiency. The proposed circuit selects power transistor sizes(X1, X2, X4, X8) with 4 bits and its efficiency is higher about the maximum of 25% at the light-load than that of a single transistor size. Input voltage and output voltage are 5V and 3.3V for maximum load currents of 500mA.

• Journal of IKEEE
• /
• v.24 no.4
• /
• pp.1058-1063
• /
• 2020

This paper proposes a 12-bit SAR A/D(Successive Approximation Register Analog-to-Digital) converter that operates at low power for bio-signal and sensor signal processing. The conventional SAR A/D converter utilized the reduction of the dynamic current, which resulted in reducing total power consumption. In order to solve the limitation of the sampling time due to charging/discharging of the capacitor for reducing dynamic current, the different sampling time on the C-DAC bit switch operation was applied to reduce the dynamic current. In addition, lowering the supply voltage of the digital block to 0.6V led to 70% reduction of the total power consumption of the proposed ADC. The proposed SAR A/D was implemented with CMOS 65nm process 1-poly 6-metal, operates with a supply voltage of 1.2V. The simulation results demonstrate that ENOB, DNL/INL, power consumption and FoM are 10.4 bits, ±0.5LSB./±1.2LSB, 31.2uW and 2.8fJ/step, respectively.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
• /
• v.46 no.9
• /
• pp.58-67
• /
• 2009

This paper presents a fully digital gain control system with a new high bandwidth and wide dynamic range power detector for DVB-S2 application. Because the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of DVB-S2 system is so high and the settling time requirement is so stringent, the conventional closed-loop analog gain control scheme cannot be used. The digital gain control is necessary for the robust gain control and the direct digital interface with the baseband modem. Also, it has several advantages over the analog gain control in terms of the settling time and insensitivity to the process, voltage and temperature variation. In order to have a wide gain range with fine step resolution, a new AGC system is proposed. The system is composed of high-bandwidth digital VGAs, wide dynamic range power detectors with RMS detector, low power SAR type ADC, and a digital gain controller. To reduce the power consumption and chip area, only one SAR type ADC is used, and its input is time-interleaved based on four power detectors. Simulation and measurement results show that the new AGC system converges with gain error less than 0.25 dB to the desired level within $10{\mu}s$. It is implemented in a $0.18{\mu}m$ CMOS process. The measurement results of the proposed IF AGC system exhibit 80-dB gain range with 0.25-dB resolution, 8 nV/$\sqrt{Hz}$ input referred noise, and 5-dBm $IIP_3$ at 60-mW power consumption. The power detector shows the 35dB dynamic range for 100 MHz input.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
• /
• v.6 no.2
• /
• pp.256-261
• /
• 2011

In this paper, a design and an implementation of an Analog to Digital (A/D) converter are introduced for the conversion of monitored battery cell voltage in the cell voltage monitoring(CVM) system in battery management system(BMS), which is one of the key devices of ECO hybrid cars. The A/D converter in CVM system required a middle conversion speed and a high resolution, therefore, a successive approximate register(SAR) typed A/D converter with 10 bits resolution has been designed and implemented using Magna 0.6um 40V process. The measurement result which kept ${\pm}1$ LSB accuracy in the full scale range(FSR) of 5V, showed the usefulness of the SAR typed A/D converter in realizing a CVM system.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
• /
• 2014.05a
• /
• pp.156-157
• /
• 2014

본 논문에서는 저전력 12비트 1MSps 연속 근사형 레지스터 아날로그-디지털 변환기를 제안한다. 제안하는 회로는 1.8V의 공급 전압에서 동작하며, Magnachip/SK Hynix $0.18{\mu}m$ CMOS 1Poly-6Metal 공정을 이용하여 설계하였다. 입력신호의 주파수가 100kHz일 때, 설계된 회로는 3.24mW의 낮은 소비전력 특성, $0.56mm^2$의 작은 칩 면적 특성, 70.03dB의 SNDR(Signal-to-Noise Distortion Ratio) 및 11.34비트의 ENOB(Effective Number of Bits) 특성을 보였다.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
• /
• v.49 no.11
• /
• pp.933-940
• /
• 2021

The space-borne SAR(Synthetic Aperture Radar) system radiates the microwave signal and receives the backscattered signal. The received signal is converted to digital at the Digital Receiver, which is implemented at the end of the SAR sensor receiving chain. The converted signal is formated after signal processing such as filtering and data compression. Two quantization are conducted in the Digital Receiver. One quantization is an analog to digital conversion at ADC(Analog-Digital Converter). Another quantization is the BAQ(Block Adaptive Quantization) for data compression. The quantization process is a conversion from a continuous or higher bit precision to a discrete or lower bit precision. As a result, a quantization noise is inevitably occurred. In this paper, the impact of two quantization processes are analyzed in a view of SNR degradation.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
• /
• v.10 no.4
• /
• pp.300-308
• /
• 2010

This paper describes the development of a low-power electrocardiogram (ECG) touch sensor intended for the use with two dry metal electrodes. An equivalent ECG extraction circuit model encountered in a ground-free two-electrode configuration is investigated for an optimal sensor read-out circuit design criteria. From the equivalent circuit model, (1) maximum sensor resolution is derived based on the electrode's background thermal noise, which originates from high electrode-skin contact impedance, together with the input referred noise of instrumentation amplifier (IA), (2) 60 Hz electrostatic coupling from mains and motion artifact are also considered to determine minimum requirement of common mode rejection ratio (CMRR) and input impedance of IA. A dedicated ECG read-out front end incorporating chopping scheme is introduced to provide an input referred circuit noise of 1.3 ${\mu}V_{rms}$ over 0.5 Hz ~ 200 Hz, CMRR of IA > 100 dB, sensor resolution of 7 bits, and dissipating only 36 ${\mu}W$. Together with 8 bits synchronous successive approximation register (SAR) ADC, the sensor IC chip is implemented in 0.18 ${\mu}m$ CMOS technology and integrated on a 5 cm $\times$ 8 cm PCB with two copper patterned electrodes. With the help of proposed touch sensor, ECG signal containing QRS complex and P, T waves are successfully extracted by simply touching the electrodes with two thumbs.