In the last 40 years, the systematic downscaling of CMOS Integrated Circuit (IC) technologies has enabled unprecedented improvements in transistor density, frequency of operation, energy efficiency, and reliability. Most recent CMOS technologies allow the integration of several billions of transistors in a digital microprocessor chip the size of a fingernail. While technology downscaling has been extremely beneficial for digital circuits, the design of analog frontend electronics and Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) in deep sub-micron CMOS technologies is becoming increasingly challenging due to the systematic power supply reduction, the intrinsically larger device parameter variability, and the higher low-frequency noise level of these transistors. Thus to counteract these effects and design high-performance ADCs operating with a high level of reliability, complex and accurate calibration circuits need to be added. However, the design of these calibration circuits is challenging, and their effectiveness is typically limited to specific operating conditions.
This project is done in cooperation with NXP Semiconductors, Eindhoven.
Your Duties As a PhD researcher from the Integrated Circuits group, you will investigate novel methodologies to design Analog-to-Digital Converters (including pipelined, Successive-Approximation (SAR), and Sigma Delta architectures) and calibrate them using Machine Learning (ML) techniques. During your PhD, you will first identify the root causes that limit the ADC performance, and then you will implement solutions to correct these errors, calibrate the ADC behavior, and improve its performance. Finally, you will design a novel ADC that includes the ML calibration and the required peripheral circuits, achieving beyond state-of-the-art performance.
In summary, your main tasks will be:
- Analyze and identify the major root causes limiting the performance of the specific ADC architecture.
- Design and implementation (at transistor-level) of the calibration schemes to mitigate non-idealities in ADCs;
- Demonstrate the potential and effectiveness of the proposed approach by designing, implementing, and characterizing Analog-to-Digital Converters achieving a performance beyond current state-of-the-art;
- Dissemination of the results of your research in international and peer-reviewed journals and conferences;
- Get involved in educational tasks such as the supervision of Master/Bachelor students and internships;
- Writing a dissertation based on the research outcomes and successfully defending it.