Rethinking Analog-Digital Interface Circuit Architectures

The trend of modern electronic systems in both wireless and wireline applications demands increasing bandwidth, dynamic range, and reconfigurability but low power and cost. On the other hand, the technology scaling is slowing down its pace and incurs significant cost particularly for analog designs. Those factors have driven the mixed-signal design community to pursue new circuit architectures towards unprecedented performance, power efficiency and flexibility. In this talk, we will examine several such attempts in ADC, DAC, and PLL designs recently demonstrated by our group members, just as examples. Several initial CMOS prototypes achieve encouraging performance and
power efficiency in comparison with the state of the arts. More importantly, they tout the potential for many future extensions, and hopefully enable more low-cost high-performance analog-digital interface circuits to transform future electronic system designs.
Mike Shuo-Wei Chen received the B.S. degree from National Taiwan University in 1998,and the M.S. and Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002 and 2006, all in Electrical Engineering. As a graduate student, he proposed and demonstrated the asynchronous SAR ADC architecture, which has already been adopted today in industry. Since 2006, he has been working on mixed-signal and RF circuits for various wireless standards at Atheros communications (now Qualcomm-Atheros). He joined EE department at University of Southern California since 2011, and currently holds Colleen and Roberto Padovani Early Career Chair position. His research group is having fun with exploring the limit of analog mixed-signal, RF ICs, Bio-inspired electronics, and signal processing techniques for circuits and systems. Dr. Chen received an honourable mention in the Asian Pacfic Mathematics Olympiad, 1994. He was the recipient of NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER)Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA) both in 2014, UC Regents' Fellowship at Berkeley in 2000 and Analog Devices Outstanding Student Award for recognition in IC design in 2006.