• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.1-9
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• 2012

A 10-b 500 MS/s A/D converter (ADC) with a hybrid calibration and error correction logic is described. The ADC employs a single-channel cascaded folding-interpolating architecture whose folding rate (FR) is 25 and interpolation rate (IR) is 8. To overcome the disadvantage of an offset error, we propose a hybrid self-calibration circuit at the open-loop amplifier. Further, a novel prevision digital error correction logic (DCL) for the folding ADC is also proposed. The ADC prototype using a 130 nm 1P6M CMOS has a DNL of ${\pm}0.8$ LSB and an INL of ${\pm}1.0$ LSB. The measured SNDR is 52.34-dB and SFDR is 62.04-dBc when the input frequency is 78.15 MHz at 500 MS/s conversion rate. The SNDR of the ADC is 7-dB higher than the same circuit without the proposed calibration. The effective chip area is $1.55mm^2$, and the power dissipates 300 mW including peripheral circuits, at a 1.2/1.5 V power supply.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.781-792
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• 2016

This paper presents a new approach to enhance the data retention of logic-compatible embedded DRAMs. The memory bit-cell in this work consists of two logic transistors implemented in generic triple-well CMOS process. The key idea is to use the parasitic junction capacitance built between the common cell-body and the data storage node. For each write access, a voltage transition on the cell-body couples up the data storage levels. This technique enhances the data retention and the read performance without using additional cell devices. The technique also provides much strong immunity from the write disturbance in the nature. Measurement results from a 64-kbit eDRAM test chip implemented in a 130 nm logic CMOS technology demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed circuit technique. The refresh period for 99.9% bit yield measures $600{\mu}s$ at 1.1 V and $85^{\circ}C$, enhancing by % over the conventional design approach.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.2
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• pp.122-133
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• 2013

An arbiter-based simple phase decision circuit (PDC) optimized for high-resolution phase-to-digital converter made up of an analog phase-frequency detector and a time-to-digital converter for all-digital phase-locked loops is proposed. It can distinguish very small phase difference between two pulses even though it consumes lower power and has smaller input-to-output delay than the previously reported PDC. Proposed PDC is realized using 130-nm CMOS process and demonstrated by transistor-level simulations. A 5-bit P2D having no offset nor deadzone using the PDC is also demonstrated. A harmonic-lock-free and small-phase-offset delay-locked loop for fixing the P2D resolution regardless of PVT variations is also proposed and demonstrated.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.123-130
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• 2016

In this paper, a high-performance arithmetic unit which can efficiently accelerate a number of algorithms for multimedia application was designed. The 3-stage pipelined arithmetic unit can execute 38 operations for complex and fixed-point data by using efficient configuration for four 16-bit by 16-bit multipliers, new sign extension method for carry-save data, and correction constant scheme to eliminate sign-extension in compression operation of multiple partial multiplication results. The arithmetic unit has about 300-MHz operating frequency and about 37,000 gates on 45nm CMOS technology and its estimated performance is 300 MCOPS(Million Complex Operations Per Second). Because the arithmetic unit has high processing rate and supports a number of operations dedicated to various applications, it can be efficiently applicable to multimedia processors.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.47 no.12
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• pp.48-54
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• 2010

This paper presents a high-performance architecture of integer-pel motion estimation circuit for H.264 video CODEC. Full search algorithm guarantees the best results by examining all candidate blocks. However, the full search algorithm requires a huge amount of computation and data. Many fast search algorithms have been proposed to reduce the computational efforts. The disadvantage of these algorithms is that data access from or to memory is very irregular and data reuse is difficult. In this paper, we propose an efficient integer-pixel motion estimation algorithm and the circuit architecture to improve the processing speed and reduce the external memory bandwidth. The proposed circuit supports seven kinds of variable block sizes and generates 41 motion vectors. We described the proposed high-performance motion estimation circuit at R1L and verified its operation on FPGA board. The circuit synthesized by using l30nm CMOS standard cell library processes 139.8 1080HD ($1,920{\times}1,088$) image frames per second and supports up to H.264 level 5.1.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2012.02a
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• pp.385-385
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• 2012

A two terminal N+/P/N+ junction device to replace the conventional selective transistor was studied as a bilateral switching device for spin transfer torque (STT) MRAM based on 3D device simulation. An N+/P/N+ junction structure with $30{\times}30nm$ area requires bi-directional current flow enough to write a data by a drain induced barrier lowering (DIBL) under a reverse bias at N+/P (or P/N+ junction), and high current on/off ratio of 106. The SiGe materials are widely used in hetero-junction bipolar transistors, bipolar compensation metal-oxide semiconductors (BiCMOS) since the band gap of SiGe materials can be controlled by changing the fraction and the strain epilayers, and the drift mobility is increased with the increasing Ge content. In this work, N+/P/N+ SiGe material based junction provides that drive current is increased from 40 to $130{\mu}A$ by increased Ge content from 10~80%. When Ge content is about 20%, the drive current density of SiGe device substantially increased to 2~3 times better than Si-based junction device in case of 28 nm P length, which is sufficient current to operation of STT-MRAM.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.347-353
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• 2017

We present a STT-MRAM read-circuit which mitigates the performance degradation caused by offsets from device mismatches. In the circuit, a single current source supplies read-current to both the data and the reference cells sequentially eliminating potential mismatches. Furthermore, an offset-free pre-amplification using a capacitor storing the mismatch information is employed to lessen the effect of the comparator offset. The proposed circuit was implemented using a 130-nm CMOS technology and Monte Carlo simulations of the circuit demonstrate its effectiveness in suppressing the effect of device mismatch.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.227-234
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• 2014

A transceiver for a high-speed inductive-coupling link is proposed. The bi-phase modulation (BPM) signaling scheme is used due to its good noise immunity. The transmitter utilizes a complementary switching method to remove glitches in transmitted data. To increase the timing margin on the receiver side, an integrating receiver with a pre-charging equalizer is employed. The proposed transceiver was implemented via a 130-nm CMOS process. The measured timing window for a $10^{-12}$ bit error rate (BER) at 1.8 Gb/s was 0.33 UI.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.7 no.5
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• pp.277-284
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• 2012

To meet the usage of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) on potable devices, this paper implements 2-level DWT using a reference many-core processor architecture and determine the optimal many-core processor. To explore the optimal many-core processor, we evaluate the impacts of a data-per-processing element ratio that is defined as the amount of data mapped directly to each processing element (PE) on system performance, energy efficiency, and area efficiency, respectively. This paper utilized five PE configurations (PEs=16, 64, 256, 1,024, and 4,096) that were implemented in 130nm CMOS technology with a 720MHz clock frequency. Experimental results indicated that maximum energy and area efficiencies were achieved at PEs=1,024. However, the system area must be limited 140mm2 and the power should not exceed 3 watts in order to implement 2-level DWT on portable devices. When we consider these restrictions, the most reasonable energy and area efficiencies were achieved at PEs=256.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.535-545
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• 2008

This paper introduces a systematic top-down and bottom-up design methodology to assist the designer in the implementation of continuous-time (CT) cascade sigma-delta (${\Sigma}{\Delta}$) modulators. The salient features of this methodology are (a) flexible behavioral modeling for optimum accuracy-efficiency trade-offs at different stages of the top-down synthesis process, (b) direct synthesis in the continuous-time domain for minimum circuit complexity and sensitivity, (c) mixed knowledge-based and optimization-based architectural exploration and specification transmission for enhanced circuit performance, and (d) use of Pareto-optimal fronts of building blocks to reduce re-design iterations. The applicability of this methodology will be illustrated via the design of a 12-bit 20 MHz CT ${\Sigma}{\Delta}$ modulator in a 1.2 V 130 nm CMOS technology.