This paper describes analog/mixed-signal circuit design in the nano CMOS era. Digitally-assisted analog technology is becoming more important, and as an example, our fully digital FPGA implementation of a TDC with self-calibration is shown. Since pure analog circuits are still present and “good” device modeling is required for their designs, device modeling technology for nano CMOS with complic...

This work presents a technique for the generation of analog sinusoidal signals with high spectral quality and reduced circuitry resources. Two integrated demonstrators are presented to show the feasibility of the approach. The proposed generation technique is based on a modified analog filter that provides a sinusoidal output as the response to a DC input. It has the attributes of digital progr...

We connect transistors and proteins in two ways. The first is by showing that they have much in common as fundamental devices of electronics and life. The second is by describing how an evolvable wiring of electronic devices can parallel the wiring of proteins into genetic regulatory networks. We then transform this connection into a methodology for the study of the evolutionary properties of c...

An efficient approach to optimize the performance of integrated analog circuits is described. The main objectives are to speed up the design process and obtain better, possibly optimal, performance compared to manual simulation-based device sizing schemes. The automatic generation of the cost function requires only a circuit netlist, a performance specification, and process parameters supplied ...

A network for the detection of an approaching object with simple-shape recognition is proposed based on lower animal vision. The locust can detect an approaching object through a simple process in the descending contralateral movement detector (DCMD) in the locust brain, by which the approach velocity and direction of the object is determined. The frog can recognize simple shapes through a simp...

This paper presents a physically based model for the metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) transistor suitable for analysis and design of analog integrated circuits. Static and dynamic characteristics of the MOS field-effect transistor are accurately described by single-piece functions of two saturation currents in all regions of operation. Simple expressions for the transconductance-to-current ratio...

We propose and analyze the error and timing of solvers consisting of both analog and digital circuitry for sparse linear systems of equations. We obtain high speed, but low precision from the analog circuits. We combine this with low speed, but high precision from the digital circuits. The hybrid circuit should be faster than digital circuits alone. As a preconditioner to standard iterative sol...

This paper presents the latest implementation of the SIMD Current-mode Analogue Matrix Processor architecture. The SCAMP-3 vision chip has been fabricated in a 0.35μm CMOS technology and comprises a 128×128 general-purpose programmable processor-perpixel array. The architecture of the chip is overviewed and implementation issues are considered. The circuit design of the analogue register is pre...