IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine

This paper stresses the importance of applying circuit theory in circuit simulation. Circuit simulation is a combination of circuit theory and numerical analysis. Both the theoretical basis and the numerical algorithms should be robust and accurate to produce reliable and correct results. This communication focuses on the theoretical and practical aspects of circuit equation formulation in the sim... View full abstract»

This paper presents an overview of passive Radio Frequency (RF) energy reception and power harvesting circuits for isolated communications and computing systems lacking access to primary power sources. A unified understanding of the energy harvesting alternatives is provided, followed by an elaborate study of RF energy harvesting within the context of embedded systems. A detailed discussion of RF ... View full abstract»

Due to the continuous power supply reduction, charge pumps circuits are widely used in integrated circuits (ICs) devoted to several kind of applications such as smart power, nonvolatile memories, switched capacitor circuits, operational amplifiers, voltage regulators, SRAMs, LCD drivers, piezoelectric actuators, RF antenna switch controllers, etc. The main focus of this tutorial manuscript is to p... View full abstract»

This paper presents a historical review of author's early works influenced by the Circuits and Systems Group at UC Berkeley of which Prof. Ernest S. Kuh was a core member. They range from modeling of nonlinear devices and systems, in particular memristors, design optimization of satellite-based private communication networks to CMOS VLSI design and layout. View full abstract»

The electric utility industry is gradually undergoing restructuring and the main paradigm shift is the introduction of the principles of competition. With the level of future demand for electricity being unclear, power market players are reluctant to commit to long-term capital investment, with the result that construction of new large-scale power plants and also transmission and distribution infr... View full abstract»

Sensor networks offer a powerful combination of distributed sensing, computing and communication. They lend themselves to countless applications and, at the same time, offer numerous challenges due to their peculiarities, primarily the stringent energy constraints to which sensing nodes are typically subjected. The distinguishing traits of sensor networks have a direct impact on the hardware desig... View full abstract»

SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) is a widely used circuit simulation framework for integrated circuit designs. The basic skeleton of SPICE time domain simulation was derived from the versions developed in UC Berkeley during the 1970s. In this paper, we report most recent numerical integration methods to improve traditional SPICE time integration schemes, which are based ... View full abstract»

As visionary as dynamic, or in-motion, wireless charging of electric vehicles appears the concept is well over a century old as this paper will show. This is because the concept of magnetic induction dates back to the pioneering work of physicist Michael Faraday in the early 19th century. Today wireless power transfer (WPT) is being standardized for stationary and quasi-stationary charging of elec... View full abstract»

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs) energy efficiency and communication reliability are often conflicting requirements. Additionally, some application areas such as industrial automation or infrastructure monitoring impose strict latency bounds. Low-power receivers (<; 1 mW power consumption) together with adapted MAC protocols have the potential to meet these diverse requirements. We present an... View full abstract»

In matters of great importance that have financial, medical, social, or other implications, we often seek a second opinion before making a decision, sometimes a third, and sometimes many more. In doing so, we weigh the individual opinions, and combine them through some thought process to reach a final decision that is presumably the most informed one. The process of consulting "several experts" be... View full abstract»

Decomposing an FIR filter into a cascade of blocks, each representing an optimal factor of H(z), the filter?s transfer function, can start with the complex-conjugate pairs of zeros of H(z) and then creating optimal pairings of these zero-pairs. This leads to a general method for designing FIR filters having minimal hardware complexity. We illustrate this concept, further techniques, benefits, and ... View full abstract»

"Moore Stress" calls for technology and architecture innovation, and System in Package (SiP) is critical to address the challenge. System in Package is a generalization of System on Chip. As such, SiP is a giant chip rather than a miniaturized Printed Circuit Board (PCB). SiP using Wafer Level Package (WLP) enables performance efficient and cost effective integration of DRAM and logic. SiP with In... View full abstract»

Networks-on-chip (NoC) have emerged to tackle different on-chip communication challenges and can satisfy different demands in terms of performance, cost and reliability. Currently, interconnects based on metal are reaching performance limits given relentless technology scaling. In particular, a performance bottleneck has emerged due to the demands for communication in terms of bandwidth for multic... View full abstract»

Demand for system-on-chip solutions has increased the interest in low drop-out (LDO) voltage regulators which do not require a bulky off-chip capacitor to achieve stability, also called capacitor-less LDO (CL-LDO) regulators. Several architectures have been proposed; however comparing these reported architectures proves difficult, as each has a distinct process technology and specifications. This ... View full abstract»

EDA (Electronic Design Automation) industry is now a multibillion dollar business and numerous commercial and university tools exist to automatically solve various sub-problems of the IC (integrated circuit) design process. Many of the underlying ideas of the algorithms implemented in those programs originated in Professor Ernest Kuh's research group at UC Berkeley. The objective of this paper is ... View full abstract»

Living organisms learn by acting on their environment, observing the resulting reward stimulus, and adjusting their actions accordingly to improve the reward. This action-based or reinforcement learning can capture notions of optimal behavior occurring in natural systems. We describe mathematical formulations for reinforcement learning and a practical implementation method known as adaptive dynami... View full abstract»

A universal wideband receiver supporting multi-band multi-standard wireless communications offers the prospective for cost reduction and flexibility improvement of next-generation handheld devices. Unlike the traditional narrowband receivers that are tailored for specific standards and are assisted by dedicated SAW filters to restrict the input signals (frequency and power), SAW-less wideband rece... View full abstract»

This paper is concerned with the physical design of quantum logic circuits. More precisely, it addresses the problem of minimizing the number of required qubit reorderings (achieved by inserting explicit SWAP gates) when mapping a quantum circuit into a linear nearest neighbor quantum archi-tecture. First, an interaction graph that captures the interaction distances among various qubits in the qua... View full abstract»

Operational amplifiers (OpAmps) have found extensive applications in analog circuits and systems for communications, consumer electronics, controls and signal conversion. Two-stage OpAmps with freguency compensation are popular for driving capacitive loads while ensuring sufficient gain and stability. Frequency compensation technigues have been evolving over the last decades in distinct applicatio... View full abstract»

In the past few years, the discovery of small-world and scale-free properties of many natural and artificial complex networks has stimulated a great deal of interest in studying the underlying organizing principles of various complex networks, which has led to dramatic advances in this emerging and active field of research. The present article reviews some basic concepts, important progress, and s... View full abstract»

Midfield wireless powering enables electronics to be designed at the millimeter-scale and operated at nearly any location in the body. Theoretical studies show a wireless power transfer paradigm with a maximum bound orders of magnitude higher than conventional near-field inductive coupling. Furthermore, higher frequency of operation for midfield coupling lends itself to miniaturization of the impl... View full abstract»

The rapid, exponential growth of modern electronics has brought about profound changes to our daily lives. However, maintaining the growth trend now faces significant challenges at both the fundamental and practical levels [1]. Possible solutions include More Moore?developing new, alternative device structures and materials while maintaining the same basic computer architecture, and More Than Moor... View full abstract»

The DCT and the DWT are used in a number of emerging DSP applications, such as, HD video compression, biomedical imaging, and smart antenna beamformers for wireless communications and radar. Of late, there has been much interest on fast algorithms for the computation of the above transforms using multiplier-free approximations because they result in low power and low complexity systems. Approximat... View full abstract»

Collaborative wildlife monitoring and tracking at large scales will help us understand the complex dynamics of wildlife systems, evaluate the impact of human actions and environmental changes on wildlife species, and answer many important ecological and evolutionary research questions. To support collaborative wildlife monitoring and research, we need to develop integrated camera-sensor networking... View full abstract»

Inductive power transfer (IPT) is now recognised as one of the "hottest" research areas in Electrical Engineering combining the EE foundation studies of electricity and magnetism with power electronics and microprocessor control. But this acceptance is very recent - as recently as 20 years ago IPT was widely supposed to be completely impractical and papers on it were in very short supply. This pap... View full abstract»

Memristors are two-terminal devices with varying resistance, where the behavior is dependent on the history of the device. In recent years, different physical phenomena of resistive switching have been linked with the theoretical concept of a memristor, and several emerging memory devices (e.g., Phase Change Memory, Resistive RAM, STT-MRAM) are now considered as memristors. Memristors hold promise... View full abstract»

The effect of jitter in data converters is analyzed, with a focus on the frequency domain treatment of the corresponding phase noise. The analysis is mostly intuitive, to give the reader a good feeling for the mechanisms involved. Both open loop oscillators and phase locked loops are considered as clock sources. Several application examples are included to illustrate the concepts. Jitter self-refe... View full abstract»

Analog signal processing is fast and can address real world problems. The applications of battery powered analog and mixed mode electronic devices require designing analog circuits to operate at low voltage levels. In this paper, some of the issues facing analog designers in implementing low voltage circuits are discussed, and possible low voltage design techniques are examined. The authors descri... View full abstract»

The three-dimensional Network-on-Chip (3D NoC) has been proposed to solve the complex on-chip communication issues in multicore systems by using die stacking technology in recent years. However, the high integration density of the stacking dies at high operating frequency results in large power density. Furthermore, the unequal thermal conductance of different logic layers leads the 3D NoC to face... View full abstract»

'Qi', the wireless power transfer interface specification published by the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC), has been regarded as the wireless charging standard and widely adopted in industry since its first release in August 2010. Larger spatial freedom between the power transmitter and power receiver provides significant convenience for users and device manufacturers, and is one of the critical f... View full abstract»

Power consumption of analog systems is poorly understood today, in contrast to the very well developed analysis of digital power consumption. We show that there is good opportunity to develop also the analog power understanding to a similar level as the digital. Such an understanding will have a large impact in the design of future electronic systems, where low power consumption will be crucial. E... View full abstract»

Clock and data recovery (CDR) architectures used in high-speed wire-linked communication receivers are often shown as PLL or DLL based topologies. However, there are many other types of CDR architectures such as phase-interpolator, oversampling and injection locked based topologies. The best choice for the CDR topology will depend on the application and the specification requirements. This paper p... View full abstract»

In this paper the analysis of SNM, RNM, WNM and static power variation with width of access, load and driver have been carried out for nanoscale FinFET based SRAM cell. FinFET based SRAM design has been proposed as an alternative solution to the bulk devices. It can be inferred from the results that with increase in the width of driver FinFET, the high SNM reduces and low SNM increases. This is du... View full abstract»

Over the past decade, there has been tremendous interest in studying the behavior of chaotic systems. They are characterized by sensitive dependence on initial conditions, similarity to random behavior, and continuous broad-band power spectrum. Chaos has potential applications in several functional blocks of a digital communication system: compression, encryption and modulation. The possibility fo... View full abstract»

Since the 2008-dated discovery of memristor behavior at the nano-scale, Hewlett Packard is credited for, a large deal of efforts have been spent in the research community to derive a suitable model able to capture the nonlinear dynamics of the nano-scale structures. Despite a considerable number of models of different complexity have been proposed in the literature, there is an ongoing debate over... View full abstract»

Cognitive radios have become a key research area in communications over the past few years. Automatic modulation classification (AMC) is an important component that improves the overall performance of the cognitive radio. Most modulated signals exhibit the property of cyclostationarity that can be exploited for the purpose of classification. In this paper, AMCs that are based on exploiting the cyc... View full abstract»

One of the main orientations in power electronics in the last decade has been the development of switching-mode converters without inductors and transformers. Light weight, small size and high power density are the result of using only switches and capacitors in the power stage of these converters. Thus, they serve as ideal power supplies for mobile electronic systems (e.g. cellular phones, person... View full abstract»

Recent research in nanotechnology has led to the practical realization of nanoscale devices that behave as memristors, a device that was postulated in the seventies by Chua based on circuit theoretical reasonings. On the other hand, neuromorphic engineering, a discipline that implements physical artifacts based on neuroscience knowledge, has related neural learning mechanisms to the operation of m... View full abstract»

A recent article published in this magazine has labeled fractional-order continuous-time systems as the "21st century systems". Indeed, this emerging research area is slowly gaining momentum among electrical engineers while its deeply rooted mathematical concepts also slowly migrate to various engineering disciplines. A very important aspect of research in fractional-order circuits and systems is ... View full abstract»

Lab-on-a-chip is a technology which changed the traditional way by which biological samples are inspected in laboratories during analyses. This technology promises many advantages including better and improved performance, portability, reliability and cost reduction. A Lab-on-a-chip is composed of three main parts; actuation, sensing and electronics. Typically, hybrid technologies are used for the... View full abstract»

Low-Density Parity-check (LDPC) code, being one of the most promising near-Shannon limit error correction codes (ECCs) in practice, has attracted tremendous attention in both academia and industry since its rediscovery in middle 1990's. Owning excellent coding gain, LDPC code also has very low error floor, and inherent parallizable decoding schemes. Compared to other ECCs such as Turbo codes, BCH ... View full abstract»

In November 2008, eight companies founded an open industry group, the Wireless Power Consortium, because these companies concluded that wireless charging solutions for mobile phones could not be introduced successfully unless wireless chargers were compatible across brands. By jointly developing a wireless power interface specification,the members of the Wireless Power Consortium share the risks a... View full abstract»

During the past few years a lot of efforts have been exerted to make the inner working of the GPS receiver visible, clear and easy to learn and modify either on the level of software or hardware. This article adds a step on the route toward the implementation of a more visible, clearer, and easier to learn and modify a single frequency GPS receiver using the C/A code on the L1 carrier. Simulink wa... View full abstract»

The availability of multi-standard terminals will be key to provide location independent connections able to take advantage of any possible infrastructure. This paper addresses both the architecture and the circuits for the RF front-end of a terminal with cellular (GSM, EDGE and UMTS), LAN (IEEE802.11a/b/g) and Bluetooth radio interfaces. A multi-standard simulator has been developed to validate t... View full abstract»

It is well known that a multi-agent system (MAS) is a specific system consisting of multiple interacting autonomous agents. Consensus or synchronization, as one of the typical collective behaviors, is ubiquitous in nature. Over the last decades, consensus has been widely investigated in various disciplines, including mathematics, physics, biology, engineering, and social sciences. In particular, c... View full abstract»

H.264/AVC, the result of the collaboration between the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group and the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group, is the latest standard for video coding. The goals of this standardization effort were enhanced compression efficiency, network friendly video representation for interactive (video telephony) and non-interactive applications (broadcast, streaming, storage, video on ... View full abstract»

The article first discusses the major non-ideal issues of low-cost transmission media for over Gbps data transmissions - the frequency dispersion loss and channel noise. The former causes ISI in received signal, which presents difficulty for clock and data recovery at high frequencies and results higher BER. The latter further degrades the received signal quality and further limits the data transm... View full abstract»

Since James Clerk Maxwell established the electromagnetic field theory in 1865, multifarious electrical and electronic products have been invented, designed, produced, and widely deployed, such as wireless communication devices, electrical machines and motors. This has profoundly changed our world and our lives. Now we cannot live without electrical products anymore and, thus, we are surrounded wi... View full abstract»

During the initial development of the IEEE 802.11n (11n) amendment for improving the throughput of wireless LANs, a lot of excitement existed surrounding the potential higher throughput (i.e., faster downloads), and increased range (distance) achievable. However, delays in the development of this standard (which began in 2003, and is still in the final draft stages) as well as vendor, customer rel... View full abstract»

Cryptography is one of the most prominent application areas of the finite field arithmetic. Almost all public-key cryptographic algorithms including the recent algorithms such as elliptic curve and pairing-based cryptography rely heavily on finite field arithmetic, which needs to be performed efficiently to meet the execution speed and design space constraints. These objectives constitute massive ... View full abstract»