A 0.13μm CMOS clock-harvesting receiver is presented which extracts a 21Hz clock embedded within the GSM standard for the wake-up of a wireless sensor network. In active mode, the receiver achieves -87dBm sensitivity with 57μs of jitter at the output while consuming 126μW. The receiver is optimized for heavy duty-cycling with a sleepmode power consumption of only 81pW. Index Terms — Analog inte...

This paper introduces a low cost near-field mapping system. This system scans automatically and dynamically, in the time domain, the magnetic field emitted by integrated circuits during the execution of a repetitive set of instructions. Application of this measurement system is given to an industrial chip designed with a 180nm CMOS process. This application demonstrates the efficiency of the sy...

Surface temperature measurements were performed with a Scanning Thermal Microscope. We aim at proving an eventual sub-micrometric resolution of this metrology when using a wollaston wire probe of micrometric size. A dedicated CMOS device was designed with arrays of lines 0.35μm in size with 0.8 μm and 10μm periods. Integrated Circuits with or without a passivition layer were tested. To enhance ...

Burn-in is accepted as a way to evaluate ageing effects in an accelerated manner. It has been suggested that burn-in stress may have a significant effect on the Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) of subthreshold CMOS circuits. This paper analyses the effect of burn-in on NBTI in the context of a Digital to Analogue Converter (DAC) circuit. Analogue circuits require matched device pair...

This paper addresses complexity issues at algorithmic and architectural level of digital baseband receiver ASIC design for GSM/GPRS/EDGE, in order to reduce power and die area as desired for cellular applications. A 2.5G multimode architecture is implemented in 0.13μm CMOS technology occupying 1.0mm and dissipating only 1.3mW in fastest EDGE data transmission mode.

Millimeter-wave communication uses a frequency of at least 30GHz, which is higher than that commonly used for wireless local-area networks (LANs) and cellular phones. Millimeter waves have been used for business communications and radar in luxury cars; however, their use has not yet spread to the general public. In recent years, an increasing amount of research results on millimeter-wave comple...

A newly developed optical method for noninvasively measuring the switching activity of operating CMOS integrated circuit chips is described. The method, denoted as picosecond imaging circuit analysis (PICA) can be used to characterize the gate-level performance of such chips and identify the locations and nature of their operational faults. The principles underlying PICA and examples of its use...

A CMOS phase-shift oscillator that uses a phase shift in the conduction of heat is proposed. The oscillator consists of an inverting ampli ̄er and a feedback thermal ̄lter that are integrated on a silicon chip. The thermal ̄lter consists of a polysilicon heater and a MOSFET thermosensor separated from each other by a SiO2 heat-conducting layer. 1 An input signal for the ̄lter travels from the heate...

In this paper a dual voltage CMOS low power output pad is presented. The pads are the interface circuits between the core and the package pins of any integrated circuit. The power consumption of these pads it is a very important parameter for the global power consumption of the integrated circuit that includes them. The proposed pad includes a pre-driver and a final output stage including ESD(e...