The history of micro system electronics is briefly traced through the successive stages of: miniaturization; subminiaturization; microminiaturization; thin-film integrated circuits; semiconductor integrated circuits; and finally morphological integrated circuits or functional blocks. The term integrated circuit is defined as the combination, on or within a single chunk of material, of multiple ...

The demand for increasing speed and low power dissipation triggers numerous research efforts with the increasing demand of wireless portable communication systems in underground mines driven by batteries. Presence of highly flammable gases in underground mines prohibits the use of higher power dissipating electronic systems. Low power wireless portable communication devices can safeguard the li...

Trustworthy system development entails a high nonrecurring engineering (NRE) cost together with a low volume of units over which to amortize that cost. For example, the potential for developmental and operational attacks against hardware requires countermeasures that make it very expensive to design and manufacture custom hardware used to build high assurance systems. To address these problems,...

Our analog and mixed-signal VLSI course uses two hardware labs. The mirrors lab demonstrates the effects of mismatch and oxide encroachment on transistors and current mirrors. The students experiment with individual transistors and three different sets of mirror circuits to obtain a handson experience with some of the limitations of integrated circuit processing. The chip has been fabricated us...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the weight values of key factors in a manager’s leadership skills that affect job performance in the listed IC Design Houses in Taiwan. The research subjects are three of the typically listed IC design houses in Taiwan. This paper adopts Analytic Network Process (ANP) to analyze the relevance of each criterion, and to identify the important factors of ea...

Wire bonding has been used in integrated circuit (IC) packaging for many years. However, there are many challenges in wire bonding for optoelectronics packaging. These challenges include bonding on sensitive devices, bonding over cavity, bonding over cantilevel leads and bonding temperature limitations. The optoelectronics package design brings another challenge, which requires wire bonding to ...

In the past few years, several tools for the automation of the analog integrated circuit (IC) cell and system layout design, with application on both new and reused designs have emerged. Yet, most of the layout design is still handmade, essentially because analog designers want to have total control over the different design options, and also, due to the fact that current fully automated genera...

The application of the sliding-mode control theory to the regulation of dc-to-dc switching converters is reviewed. Subsequently, linear dynamical models are derived and compensating networks are designed. An analog integrated circuit illustrating the theory has been designed, implemented and applied to regulate a buck converter in continuous conduction mode. Experimental verifications are provi...

Bonding wires are extensively used in integrated circuit (IC) packaging and circuit design in RF applications. An approach to fast three-dimensional (3-D) modeling of the geometry for bonding wires in RF circuits and packages is demonstrated. The geometry can readily be used to extract electrical parameters such as inductance and capacitance. An equivalent circuit is presented to model the freq...

Aneural-learning fuzzy technique is proposed for T–S fuzzy-model identification ofmodel-free physical systems. Further, an algorithm with a defined modelling index is proposed to integrate and to guarantee that the proposed neural-based optimal fuzzy controller can stabilize physical systems; the modelling index is defined to denote the modelling-error evolution, and to ensure that the training...