Today's IC industry keeps moving toward new territories in electronics with a continued technology scaling. Enabled by advances in semiconductor manufacturing technology, modern ICs integrate various analog and digital signal processing funtions on a tiny silicon substrate. As the industry moves beyond nanometer-scale regime, analog and mixed-signal IC design is facing a number of issues that were not present in micrometer-scale designs. We are devoted to conducting innovative researches that address challenging problems in nanometer-scale mixed-signal IC designs.
High-Performance Data Converter Designs
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AD and DA interfae circuits, or data converters, are inevitable mixed-signal IC building blocks any modern smart devices. With continued technology scaling, a number of signal processings that were traditionally performed in analog domain are now handled in digital domain with better energy and areaq efficiency. To enable this trend, mixed-signal IC design in nanometer-scale technology requires energy-efficient data converters in a small silicon area. MSEL is focused on very high speed (> Gsps) data converter designs as well as extremely low power data conveters for various sensor applications.
Integrated Smart Sensor Designs
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A sensor is an integral part of every modern electronics today. Continued technology scaling has enabled the realizaiton of cheap and tiny “smart” sensors that collect environmental information while drawing nano-amp level of current. The ability to continuously monitor such environmental information in a large-scale will open unprecedented applications that will greatly benefit healthcare and human welfare. MSEL is pursing researches on designing integrated temperature and pressure sensors in nanometer-scale CMOS technologies. |
