Guest Editorial - Solid-State Circuits, IEEE Journal of

THIS special issue consists of papers which have been presented at the 23rd European Solid-State Circuits Conference, held September 16–18, 1997 in Southampton, U.K. Three hundred sixteen people attended this ESSCIRC conference, which has a strong focus on integrated circuit design, including sensor interfaces, various analog functions, communication circuits, mixed-signal systems, memories and digital circuit design. The papers were selected following the recommendations of the audience, the chairmen, and the program committee. The first group of papers deals with sensor interfaces which is the starting point of many signal processing chains. In the first paper, by Huang and Oberle, a passive telemetry IC for biomedical applications is described. This very low power BiCMOS data acquisition system includes an RF-DC converter and voltage regulator. Tuthill describes a temperature sensor in 0.6m CMOS technology. The circuit uses switched current and switched capacitor techniques and includes a 10-bit ADC for digital outputs. The second group consists of two papers dealing with LF analog circuit design. In the paper by Duisters and Dijkmans, a CMOS opamp for audio applications is presented. In this circuit the local supply voltage is boosted to make rail-torail input possible. The advantage of this technique is the resulting low distortion level of the opamp in noninverting gain configurations. Den Besten and Nauta describe, in their paper, a fully integrated 5-V-to-3.3-V supply voltage regulator for applications in digital IC’s. The circuit requires no external components and special precautions have been taken to allow 5 V in the 3.3-V CMOS process. The third group of papers deals with analog switched capacitor and continuous-time filters. In the paper by Quinn, a high-accuracy switched capacitor bandpass filter for SECAM TV video applications is described. The recursive bandpass filter is based on a charge redistribution technique and dissipates only 4 mW in 5-V CMOS. Another switched capacitor filter is presented by Vazquez et al. This paper focuses on design for testability and the unified onand off-line testing approach presented is proven to be useful for opamp-based analog circuits in general. Punzenberger and Enz present a paper on an analog continuous-time log-domain filter. The BiCMOS filter can be tuned over three decades, up to 10 MHz, and is power efficient at low supply voltages. The next three papers deal with oscillators and PLL’s. Vaucher and Kasperkovitz present a wide-band tuning system for fully integrated satellite receivers. The wide loop bandwidth of the bipolar circuit enables use of noisy integrated VCO’s for reception of satellite digital signals. A two-chip ISM band frequency synthesizer is described by Filiol et al. This high-resolution frequency synthesizer is controlled by a fourth-order digital sigma–delta modulator. A compact digital