• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.28-35
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• 2007

This paper presents a high-speed flash analog-to-digital converter (ADC) for ultra wide band (UWB) receivers. In this flash ADC, the interpolating technique is adopted to reduce the number of the amplifiers and a linear and wide-bandwidth interpolating amplifier is presented. For this ADC, the transistor size for the cascaded stages is inversely scaled to improve the trade-off in bandwidth and power consumption. The active inductor peaking technique is also employed in the pre-amplifiers of comparators and the track-and-hold circuit to enhance the bandwidth. Furthermore, a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) is embedded for the sake of measurements. This chip has been fabricated in $0.13{\mu}m$ 1P8M CMOS process and the total power consumption is 113mW with 1V supply voltage. The ADC achieves 4-bit effective number of bits (ENOB) for input signal of 200MHz at 5-GSample/sec.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.1-9
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• 2012

A 10-b 500 MS/s A/D converter (ADC) with a hybrid calibration and error correction logic is described. The ADC employs a single-channel cascaded folding-interpolating architecture whose folding rate (FR) is 25 and interpolation rate (IR) is 8. To overcome the disadvantage of an offset error, we propose a hybrid self-calibration circuit at the open-loop amplifier. Further, a novel prevision digital error correction logic (DCL) for the folding ADC is also proposed. The ADC prototype using a 130 nm 1P6M CMOS has a DNL of ${\pm}0.8$ LSB and an INL of ${\pm}1.0$ LSB. The measured SNDR is 52.34-dB and SFDR is 62.04-dBc when the input frequency is 78.15 MHz at 500 MS/s conversion rate. The SNDR of the ADC is 7-dB higher than the same circuit without the proposed calibration. The effective chip area is $1.55mm^2$, and the power dissipates 300 mW including peripheral circuits, at a 1.2/1.5 V power supply.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.713-718
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• 2016

Predicting precise specifications of differential mixed-signal circuits is a difficult problem, because analytically derived correlation between process variations and conventional specifications exhibits the limited prediction accuracy due to the phase unbalance, for most self-tests. This paper proposes an efficient prediction technique to provide accurate specifications of differential mixed-signal circuits in a system-on-chip (SoC) based on a nonlinear statistical nonlinear regression technique. A spectrally pure sinusoidal signal is applied to a differential DUT, and its output is fed into another differential DUT through a weighting circuitry in the loopback configuration. The weighting circuitry, which is employed from the previous work [3], efficiently produces different weights on the harmonics of the loopback responses, i.e., the signatures. The correlation models, which map the signatures to the conventional specifications, are built based on the statistical nonlinear regression technique, in order to predict accurate nonlinearities of individual DUTs. In production testing, once the efficient signatures are measured, and plugged into the obtained correlation models, the harmonic coefficients of DUTs are readily identified. This work provides a practical test solution to overcome the serious test issue of differential mixed-signal circuits; the low accuracy of analytically derived model is much lower by the errors from the unbalance. Hardware measurement results showed less than 1.0 dB of the prediction error, validating that this approach can be used as production test.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.56-64
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• 2017

In this paper, an advanced ZigBee (AZB) system for internet-of-things (IoT) applications is proposed which can support various data rates from 31.25 Kbps to 2 Mbps, and the implementation results of the AZB baseband processor are presented. Repetition coding for 32-chip direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) symbol is applied for low rates under 250 Kbps to extend the coverage. Convolution coding, puncturing, and interleaving for non-DSSS symbol are performed for high rates from 500 Kbps to 2 Mbps for multi-media services. Simulation results show that the coverage increases at the rate of 51.8-77.3% for various environments compared with IEEE 802.15.4 ZigBee. AZB baseband processor was implemented in 180 nm CMOS process and total gate counts are 260K with the size of $5.8mm^2$.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.65-78
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• 2017

Single Event Transient has a critical impact on highly integrated logic circuits which are currently common in various commercial and consumer electronic devices. Reliability against the soft and intermittent faults will become a key metric to evaluate such complex system on chip designs. Our previous work analyzing soft errors was focused on parallelizing and optimizing error propagation procedures for individual transient faults on logic and sequential cells. In this paper, we present a new propagation technique where a fault binary decision diagram (BDD) continues to merge every new fault generated from the subsequent logic gate traversal. BDD-based transient fault analysis has been known to provide the most accurate results that consider both electrical and logical properties for the given design. However, it suffers from a limitation in storing and handling BDDs that can be increased in size and operations by the exponential order. On the other hand, the proposed method requires only a visit to each logic gate traversal and unnecessary BDDs can be removed or reduced. This results in an approximately 20-200 fold speed increase while the existing parallelized procedure is only 3-4 times faster than the baseline algorithm.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.300-312
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• 2014

A single-inductor multiple-output (SIMO) DC-DC converter providing buck and boost outputs with a new switching sequence is presented. In the proposed switching sequence, which does not require any additional blocks, input energy is delivered to outputs continuously by flowing current through the inductor, which leads to high conversion efficiency regardless of the balance between the buck and boost output loads. Furthermore, instead of multiple output loop compensation, only the freewheeling current feedback loop is compensated, which minimizes the number of off-chip components and nullifies the need for the equivalent series resistance (ESR) of the output capacitor for loop compensation. Therefore, power conversion efficiency and output voltage ripples can be improved and minimized, respectively. Implemented in a 0.35-${\mu}m$ CMOS, the proposed SIMO DC-DC converter achieves high conversion efficiency regardless of the load balance between the two outputs with maximum efficiency reaching up to 82% under heavy loads.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.185-192
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• 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.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.6 no.10
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• pp.871-880
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• 2000

A twin-servo mechanism is used to increase the payload capacity and assembling speed of high precision motion control systems such as semiconductor chip mounters. In this paper, we focus on the modeling of the twin-servo system and propose its network representation. And also, we propose a robust synchronizing motion control algorithm to cancel out the skew motion of the twin-servo system caused by different dynamic characteristics of two driving systems and the vibration generated by high accelerating and decelerating motions. The proposed control algorithm consists of separate feedback motion control algorithms for each driving system and a skew motion compensation algorithm. A robust tracking controller based on internal-loop compensation is proposed as a separate motion controller and its disturbance attenuation property is shown. The skew motion compensation algorithm is also designed to maintain the synchronizing motion during high speed operation, and the stability of the whole closed loop system is proved based on passivity theory. Finally, experimental results are shown to illustrate control performance.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.47-54
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• 2003

New efficiency enhancement techniques have been devised and implemented to InGaP/GaAs HBT MMIC power amplifiers for W-CDMA mobile terminals applications. Two different types of bias current control circuits that select the efficient quiescent currents in accordance with the required output power levels are proposed for overall power efficiency improvement. A dual chain power amplifier with single matching network composed of two different parallel-connected power amplifier is also introduced. With these efficiency enhancement techniques, the implemented MMIC power amplifiers presents power added efficiency (PAE) more than 14.8 % and adjacent channel leakage ratio(ACLR) lower than -39 dBc at 20 dBm output power and PAE more than 39.4% and ACLR lower than -33 dBc at 28 dBm output power. The average power usage efficiency of the power amplifier is improved by a factor of more than 1.415 with the bias current control circuits and even up to a factor of 3 with the dual chain power amplifier.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics D
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• v.35D no.10
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• pp.76-82
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• 1998

As the minimum feature size of a semiconductor chip gets smaller, the inevitable distortion of patterned image by optical lithography becomes the limiting factor in the mass production of VLSI. The optical proximity correction (OPC), which corrects pattern distortion that originates from the resolution limit of optical lithography, is becoming indispensable technology. In this paper, we describe a program that corrects optical proximity effect and thus finds the optimum mask pattern with a Monte-Carlo method. The program was applied to real memory cell patterns to produce mask patterns that generate image patterns closer to object images than original mask patterns, and increase of process margin is expected, as well.