Designing Analog and RF circuits for Ultra-low Supply Voltages

Peter Kinget
Columbia University, New York
http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~kinget

Abstract

Many trends in IC technology and its applications are driving the supply
voltage for integrated circuits down into the sub-1V region. Whereas
important advantages for ultra-low voltage digital circuits have been
demonstrated, the design of ultra-low voltage analog and RF integrated
circuits poses a lot of challenges and require the rethinking of many
basic analog circuit blocks. We will discuss these challenges and also
opportunities for designing analog and RF integrated circuits to operate
from ultra-low supply voltages down to 0.5V.  Solutions ranging from
exploiting the 4-terminals of the MOS device or the threshold voltage
dependence on channel length, to the use of circuit topologies that
require only stacks of two devices are discussed.  The realization of
full analog and RF system functions including a 0.5V continuous-time
filter, a 0.5V continous-time sigma-delta ADC and a 0.5V 2.4GHz RF
receiver and synthesizer is demonstrated and the enabling architecture
modifications are introduced.  The techniques and results developed in
this research aim to enable ultra-low voltage analog and RF circuits
both in the context of relatively large threshold voltages, e.g.,
|VT|=VDD, as well as lower threshold voltages.


Bio

Peter R. Kinget received the engineering degree (Summa cum Laude) in
electrical and mechanical engineering and the Ph.D. (Summa cum Laude
with Congratulations of the Jury) in electrical engineering from the
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, in 1990 and 1996, respectively.

From 1996 to 1999 he was at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, in
Murray Hill, NJ, as a Member of Technical Staff in the Design Principles
Department. From 1999 to 2002 he held various technical and management
positions in IC design and development at Broadcom, CeLight and
MultiLink. In the summer of 2002 he joined the faculty of the Department
of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, NY. He is also a
consultant to industry. His research interests are in analog and RF
integrated circuits and signal processing. He has published over 70
papers in journals and conferences and holds 6 US patents with several
applications under review. His research group has received funding from
the National Science Foundation, the Semiconductor Research Corporation,
an IBM Faculty Award and from several grants from semiconductor
companies.

Dr. Kinget is a Senior Member of the IEEE and Associate Editor of the
IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits (2003-). He has served as a member
of the Technical Program Committee of the IEEE Custom Integrated
Circuits Conference (CICC) (2000-2005) and the Symposium on VLSI
Circuits (2003-2006), and currently serves on the Technical Program
Committees of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (2005-)
and the European Solid-State Circuits Conference (2005-).