Measurement and Control Technology in Analog IC Design

Section 1: Introduction Analog technology is very important in commercial and industrial instruments and systems – such as measuring instruments and automatic control systems -that have analog inputs and outputs. Consumer equipment drives demand for improvements in analog circuit performance, and this naturally leads to performance improvements in commercial and industrial equipment. Fig.1 shows a representative piece of high-end measuring equipment: a new digital oscilloscope with 40Gsps ADC. This ADC is fabricated using an ordinary CMOS process which is mainly used for consumer applications. This example shows clearly that improvements in methods of fabricating analog circuits for consumer use can lead to improvements in measurement instruments. However, it is also true that it is impossible to achieve such high performance just by using the latest CMOS process. The power consumption of the ADC is much higher than usual consumer devices, so it requires special cooling techniques.