Microelectronic Circuits Centre Ireland - Masters by Research Theses

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    Investigation and design of key circuit blocks in a 10 bit SAR ADC at 100 MS/s
    (University College Cork, 2020-07-10) O'Sullivan, Gerald; McCarthy, Kevin G.
    The work in this thesis is based on the investigation and design of key circuit blocks in a high speed, high resolution SAR ADC in TSMC’s 28nm technology. The research carried out analyses the circuit limitations of the switched capacitor DAC and the settling problems of the reference voltage associated with a switched capacitor scheme. The switched capacitor DAC is a critical block for overall ADC performance and various trade-offs are weighed up before discussing the layout of the split capacitor DAC implemented in the project, from unit capacitor up to top level routing. It also investigates the main sources of error using this topology and implements effective ways of mitigating these errors. The schematic design of DAC switches is also carried out and the results section discusses the top level linearity performance of the DAC. This work also focuses on detailed analysis and implementation of a reference buffer circuit solution that is capable of supplying a reference voltage that is highly accurate and can settle in enough time for the high speed and high resolution specifications required by the SAR ADC. Various solutions were comprehensively investigated for this problem and the design of the chosen flipped voltage follower topology was implemented in schematic and layout. It was subsequently simulated at schematic and extracted parasitics level to verify its functionality and determine its overall performance. Finally, the work done in each block is verified in the context of the whole ADC by top level schematic and extracted layout simulation.
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    Design of a low power, 14-bit continuous time delta sigma modulator for IoT radio receiver
    (University College Cork, 2018-08-31) Assom, Ian; O'Connell, Ivan; O'Hare, Daniel
    Analog-to-Digital Converters are a fundamental building block of modern integrated RF radio transceivers. In the receiver signal chain, converting an analog baseband signal to the digital domain can consume a significant proportion of an integrated transceivers power budget. Coupled with this, the demand for flexible, low power, and robust ADCs to meet modern Internet of Things (IoT) wireless communication standards are ever increasing. Due to their oversampling nature, and inherent anti-aliasing filtering properties, Continuous Time Delta Sigma Modulator (CTDSM) ADCs are very well suited for low power IoT radio receiver architectures. However, CTDSM performance can suffer from clock jitter effects and inter-symbol interference (ISI) in the feedback DAC waveform which can significantly reduce SNR at the ADC output. The feedback DACs in CTDSM dictates the overall modulator’s accuracy since any error introduced by this block appears directly at the output. In multibit CTDSMs the DAC mismatch greatly limits the modulator linearity. On the other hand, single bit CTDSMs are inherently linear and more area efficient compared to multibit counterpart, however they require higher order loop filters and oversampling ratio (OSR) to achieve similar performance. Also, variation in the rising and falling times of the DAC pulses in CTDSMs produce ISI. Previous works have shown that employing a Return-to-Zero (RTZ) feedback DAC pulse, the ISI issue can be mitigated at the expense of increasing clock jitter sensitivity. On the other hand, incorporating Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter in the feedback DAC can reduce the clock jitter sensitivity. This work will propose a 4th order feedforward, single bit CTDSM with a return-to-zero (RTZ) feedback DAC that achieves state-of-the-art SNR in the presence of significant clock jitter by incorporating a FIR feedback DAC in the feedback path. The proposed single bit design combines the lower ISI sensitivity of the RTZ DAC with the lower jitter sensitivity of FIR DAC to produce a CTDSM suitable for IoT radio receiver and allows for an area efficient design that can meet the strict linearity and SNR requirements of a low power, high performance IoT based receiver architecture. The proposed CTDSM architecture was first modelled and simulated in MATLAB SIMULINK to demonstrate the feasibility of the adopted methodology of addressing DAC non-idealities in CTDSM. Time domain behavioral simulation achieves a peak SNR of 89 dB without circuit thermal noise in presence of 4.2 ps rms jitter at 24 MHz sampling frequency over 250 kHz bandwidth. The circuit-level realization of the CTDSM in 65 nm CMOS process has a simulated power consumption of 1.407 mW from a 1.2 V supply. The Walden figure of merit is FoM_W=0.172pJ\/conv. And the peak SNR of 84.8 dB was achieved under the influence of circuit thermal noise.