High Performance Continuous-time Filters for InformationTransfer Systems. (August 2003)Ahmed Nader Mohieldin, B.Sc., Cairo University, Egypt;M.Sc., Cairo University, Egypt;Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Edgar Sánchez-Sinencio Vast attention has been paid to active continuous-time filters over the years. Thus asthe cheap, readily available integrated circuit OpAmps replaced...

Nowadays, due to the increasing complexity of circuits and systems incorporating mixedsignal components, many designers recognise the advantages of, and in some cases the necessity for, mixed-signal modelling and simulation of the circuits and systems as a whole prior to, during and post production of the circuit or system. This is particularly so within the microelectronics (semiconductor) are...

This thesis presents a system for optimization of analog circuit topologies and component values. The topology is optimized using simulated annealing, while the component values are optimized using gradient descent. Local minima are avoided and constraints are kept through the use of coordinate transformations, as well as the use of default starting points for component values. The system is ta...

Recent advances in technology are leading to increases in the complexity and applications of analogue and mixedsignal integrated circuits. This trend has been accomponied by an increase in the complexity of associated test specifications. Furthermore, the use of functional & specification based test programs for the analogue circuitry is being questioned due to high implementation costs, the di...

A broadband Circuit Analogue (CA) absorber using double-circular-loop array is investigated in this paper. A simple equivalent circuit model is presented to accurately analyze this CA absorber. The circuit simulation of the proposed model agrees well with full-wave simulations. Optimization based the equivalent circuit model, is applied to design a single-layer circuit analogue absorber using d...

Continuous advances in IC (integrated circuits) processing technologies offer the possibility to produce integrated circuits with increased complexity and capability at a reduced cost. In addition, integrated circuits are composed more and more of heterogeneous embedded systems with various kinds of digital, analogue, and mixed-signal circuits and sensors that are integrated on the same IC. In ...

Many ASIC companies make it easy to add a PLL, offering the core as a drop-in cell on a standard-cell design or as a cell option in a gate array. However, that seemingly simple addition of a PLL cell to an all-digital ASIC can cause several problems if the ASIC designer isn’t careful. Although much of what is inside a PLL circuit is high-speed digital circuitry, the guts of the PLL include anal...

Continued scaling of CMOS technology affects both, the parameters and the characteristics of MOSFET and the integrated circuit built on them and introduces some new problems in analog design. The reduction of the gate length and the gate oxide thickness led to improvements in terms of chip area, speed and power consumption. At the same time, nonlinear output conductance, reduced voltage gain an...

Current mirror (CM) is the basic building block in analog and mixed mode circuit design. For high performance analog circuit applications, the current transfer ratio, output impedance and output swing are the most important parameters to determine the performance of the current mirror. CM’s are important for analog integrated circuits because of their wide use as constant sources or active load...

We present a practical and economical method for physical fault insertion in analog circuits using Field Programmable Analog Arrays (FPAAs) for use in the development and evaluation of manufacturing and system-level tests for analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits and systems. The method involves the manipulation of configuration bits used to program the FPAA to emulate catastrophic faults...