INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the WWVB Receiver project home page! We are the Electronics Beasts group. To learn more about the details of the project, please take a look at the demonstration video and read more about the system by using the navigation bar above.
PROJECT BACKGROUND
WWVB is a time signal radio station near Fort Collins, Colorado operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Many of the radio-controlled clocks and other consumer electronic products in the United States use the broadcasted signal to synchronize their time. WWVB continuously broadcasts digital time codes on a 60kHz carrier in two different formats at a rate of 1 bit per second using pulse width modulation(PWM) as well as phase modulation(PM). The details of the time code can be found in: Enhanced WWVB Broadcast Format. Our project goal is to develop a chip that can receive a WWVB signal, decodes the time under pulse width modulation scheme and the data can be read via SPI interface.
This project is part of the ELEN 6350 VLSI Design Lab course taught and supervised by Professor Peter Kinget in Spring 2023. This course offers an exciting opportunity for students to experience the entire flow from pre-silicon design to post-silicon validation with 65 nm TSMC CMOS Technology.
We would like to thank Prof. Peter Kinget for this opportunity and his support and feedback throughout this course. Many thanks to Apple Inc. for the generous sponsorship of the chip fabrication. We also would like to thank to Hongzhe Jiang, Mor Shimshi, Alfred Davidson, Ray Xu for all the guidance and support on design, CAD tool flow, digital flow, SPI implementation and feedback. We would also like to Joao Cerqueira and other Apple engineers for participating in our design reviews and providing feedback.
Fig. 1: Photo of the chip die