Integrated Circuit manufacturing complexities have resulted in decreasing product yields and reliabilities. This process has been accelerated with the advent of very deep sub-micron technologies coupled with the introduction of newer materials and technologies like copper interconnects, siliconon-insulator and increased wafer sizes. The need to improve product yields has been recognized and cur...

Inspired by biological information scheme, pulse frequency modulation (PFM) technique is robust for noise sources due to its digital encode of analog signals. In a viewpoint of image sensors, PFM is also useful for a wide dynamic range and has already been demonstrated over 60 dB. We have designed a pixel circuit of a CMOS image sensor using PFM for the next generation architecture of vision ch...

Powerful branch predictors along with a large branch target buffer (BTB) are employed in superscalar and simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) processors for instruction-level parallelism and thread-level parallelism exploitation. However, the large BTB not only dominates the predictor energy consumption, but also becomes a major roadblock in achieving faster clock frequencies at deep sub-micron t...

Implantable image sensors have several biomedical applications due to their miniature size, light weight, and low power consumption achieved through sub-micron standard CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) technologies. The main applications are in specific cell labeling, neural activity detection, and biomedical imaging. In this paper the recent research studies on implantable CMOS i...

CMOS technology scaling is creating significant issues for analog circuit design. For example, reduced signal swing and device gain make it increasingly difficult to realize high-speed, high-gain feedback loops traditionally used in switched capacitor circuits. This research involves two complementary methods for addressing scaling issues. First is the development of two blind digital calibrati...

This work reports on a surprising and abnormal increase of the Raman intensity when the probing area is moved to the edge of a mechanically cleaved Si wafer. Our detailed surface structure study based on atomic force microscope and scanning electron microscope rules out any effect from surface morphology. Systematic study of the Raman system focusing effect with a range of μm finds no focusing ...

We design an ultra-compact active hybrid plasmonic ring resonator for lasing applications at deep sub-wavelength scale. The combined contributions of hybrid plasmonic mode, circular-shaped cross section of nanowire, and ring resonator structure with round-trip whispering-gallery cavity, benefit reduced metallic absorption loss, tight mode confinement, enhanced cavity feedback, achieving high qu...

Present day electronic industry faces the major problem of standby leakage current, as the processor speed increases, there is requirement of high speed cache memory. SRAM being mainly used for cache memory design, several low power techniques are being used for SRAM cell design. Full CMOS 6T SRAM cell is the most preferred choice for digital circuits. This paper reviews various leakage power t...

As technology feature size is reduced, ESD becomes the dominant failure mode due to lower gate oxide breakdown voltage. In this paper, the effectiveness of new gate and substrate triggering techniques has been investigated to lower the trigger voltage of the LVTSCR and MOSFET based ESD protection circuits using 2D simulations and HBM/TLP measurements. The simulation results show that the using ...