1Three Digital Operational Transconductance Amplifier (DIGOTA) topologies, i.e. the standard DIGOTA, a Schmitt-Trigger-Based DIGOTA (ST-DIGOTA) and a DIGOTA with a Floating-Inverter input stage (FI-DIGOTA), are designed for the first time in a 16nm CMOS FinFET technology and their performance is compared on basis of post-layout simulations. All the DIGOTAs operate at 300 mV power supply while driving a capacitive load of 350 pF. The standard DIGOTA presented the lowest silicon area (44 μm2) and a power consumption of 99.4 nW at 59 kHz Gain-Bandwidth Product (GBW). The ST-DIGOTA achieved the highest DC gain of 43.9 dB, at the cost of a 6X increased power (609 nW) and 14% larger area, while the FI-DIGOTA achieves the highest GBW (100.3 kHz) and Slew Rate (8 mV/μs) at 36X more power (3.67 μW) and 2.5x larger are than the standard DIGOTA.According to these results, an area-normalized large signal figure of merit (IFOMLA) of 117k, 19.2k and 1.8k (mV/μs)•pF/(nA• mm2) was accomplished along with an area-normalized small signal figure of merit (IFOMSA) of 1.42M, 236k and 23.6k kHz •pF/(nA•mm2) for the DIGOTA, ST-DIGOTA and FI-DIGOTA, respectively, where the first two topologies surpass the current state of the art.

The article presents the design and the architectural optimization of a new Hybrid, High-Resolution Digital Pulse Width Modulator (HHR-DPWM) and its implementation in an integrated, digitally-controlled, voltage-mode, point-of-load (POL) buck converter for automotive applications. The pro-posed HHR-DPWM architecture, which features a synchronous counter-based DPWM, a delay locked loop (DLL)-based digital-to-time converter (DTC) with sub-clock-cycle resolution, and Dyadic Digital Pulse Modulation (DDPM) dithering, is optimized to meet the requirements of the POL converter at low cost and design effort. The POL converter with the proposed HHR-DPWM is fabricated in the 110 nm BCD9s technology by STMi-croelectronics. Based on measurements, the converter regulates the output voltage with 2 mV accuracy, 2 mV peak to peak ripple and a power efficiency up to 95.4% at 3.4 V output voltage.

This special session paper introduces the Horizon Europe NEUROPULS project, which targets the development of secure and energy-efficient RISC-V interfaced neuromorphic accelerators using augmented silicon photonics technology. Our approach aims to develop an augmented silicon photonics platform, an FPGA-powered RISC-V-connected computing platform, and a complete simulation platform to demonstrate the neuromorphic accelerator capabilities. In particular, their main advantages and limitations will be addressed concerning the underpinning technology for each platform. Then, we will discuss three targeted use cases for edge-computing applications: Global National Satellite System (GNSS) anti-jamming, autonomous driving, and anomaly detection in edge devices. Finally, we will address the reliability and security aspects of the stand-alone accelerator implementation and the project use cases.

In this work, a capacitance-to-digital converter (CDC) suitable for direct energy harvesting is introduced. The nW peak power and the ability to operate at any supply voltage in the 0.3-1.8 V range allow complete suppression of any intermediate DC-DC conversion, and hence direct supply provision from the harvester, as demonstrated with a mm-scale solar cell. The proposed CDC architecture eliminates the need for any additional support circuitry, preserving true nW-power operation, and reducing design and integration effort. In detail, the architecture is based on a pair of double-swappable oscillators, and avoids the need for any voltage/current/frequency reference circuit in the oscillator mismatch compensation. The digital and differential nature of the architecture counteracts the effect of process/voltage/temperature variations. A load-agnostic one-time self-calibration scheme compensates mismatch, and can be run from boot to run stage of the chip lifecycle. The proposed self-calibration scheme suppresses any trimming or testing time for low-cost systems, and avoids any input capacitance disconnection requirement. A 180-nm testchip shows 7-bit ENOB down to 0.3 V and 1.37-nW total power, when powered by a 1-mm2 indoor solar cell down to 10 lux (i.e., late twilight).

A Relaxation Digital-to-Analog Converter (ReDACs) with a novel, all-digital, radix-based digital correction technique for clock-indifferent linear operation is presented in this paper. The ReDAC architecture proposed in this paper does not require dedicated circuit for frequency tuning, and achieves linearity by digitally pre-processing the DAC input code by a Radix-based Digital Correction (RBDC) algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed RBDC approach is demonstrated by transistor level simulations on a 10-bit, 1.7MS/s ReDAC in 180nm CMOS. Thanks to the proposed RBDC, under a 16% deviation from the ideal clock period, the maximum INL of the ReDAC is improved from 79.4 to 1.01LSB, its maximum DNL is improved from 158.3 to 0.45LSB and its SNDR is increased from 22.2 (3.4 ENOB) to 58.5dB (9.4 ENOB), at the cost of an increased power consumption from $1.85 \mu \mathrm{W}$ to $9.15 \mu \mathrm{W}$.

In this paper, the implementation on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) of Relaxation Digital to Analog Converters (ReDACs), which take advantage of the impulse response of a first-order RC network to generate and combine binary weighted voltages, is addressed. For this purpose, the dominant ReDAC nonlinearity limitation related to the parasitics of the RC network is analyzed and a simple and robust technique for its effective suppression is proposed. Moreover, a ReDAC foreground digital calibration strategy suitable to FPGA implementation is introduced to tune the clock frequency of the converter, as requested for ReDAC operation. The novel error suppression technique and calibration strategy are finally implemented on a 13-bit, 514 S/s prototype (ReDAC1) and on a 11-bit, 10.5 kS/s prototype (ReDAC2), which are experimentally characterized under static and dynamic conditions. Measured results on ReDAC1 (ReDAC2) reveal 1.68 LSB (1.53 LSB) maximum INL, 1.54 LSB (1.0 LSB) maximum DNL, 76.4 dB (67.9 dB) THD, 79.7 dB (71.4 dB) SFDR and 71.3 dB (63.3 dB) SNDR, corresponding to 11.6 (10.2) effective bits (ENOB).

In this paper, passive-less fully-digital operational transconductance amplifiers (DIGOTA) for energy- and area-constrained systems are modeled and analyzed from a design viewpoint. The digital behavior of DIGOTAs is modeled as an equivalent small-signal differential-mode circuit with zero bias current, and a common-mode feedback loop operating as a self-oscillating threshold sampler. Such continuous-time equivalent circuits are used to derive an explicit model of the main performance parameters that are generally adopted to characterize OTAs. This provides an insight into circuit operation and allows to derive practical guidelines to achieve a given design target. Among the others, an explicit model is derived for the DC gain, the frequency response, the gain-bandwidth product, the input-referred noise, and the input offset voltage. The models are validated via direct comparison with multi-die measurement results in CMOS 180 nm. From an application viewpoint, the voltage (power) reduction down to 0.25 V (sub-nW) uniquely enable direct harvesting (e.g., with solar cells), suppressing any intermediate DC-DC conversion stage. This further enhances the area efficiency advantage of DIGOTA stemming from its fully-digital nature, making it well suited for cost-sensitive and purely-harvested systems.

A reference-free, fully digital foreground self-calibration strategy intended to automatically tune the clock frequency of Relaxation Digital to Analog Converters (ReDACs), as demanded for linear operation, is presented in this paper. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by computer simulations on a 10-bit, 2MS/s ReDAC designed in 40nm CMOS and operated from a 600mV power supply voltage. After the proposed calibration, the ReDAC is shown to operate near the optimal clock frequency achieving 0.98 LSB maximum INL, 1.00 LSB maximum DNL and 9.06 ENOB.

In this paper, two circuit topologies of pW-power Hz-range wake-up oscillators for sensor node applications are presented. The proposed circuits are based on standard cells utilizing the Dynamic Leakage Suppression logic style [4]-[5]. The proposed oscillators exhibit low supply voltage sensitivity over a wide supply voltage range, from nominal voltage down to the deep sub-threshold region (i.e., 0.3 V). This enables direct powering from energy harvesters or batteries through their whole discharge cycle, suppressing the need for voltage regulation. Post-layout time-domain simulations of the proposed oscillators in 180nm show a power consumption of 1.4-1.7pW, a supply-sensitivity of 55-40%/V over the 0.3V-1.8V supply voltage range, and a compact area down to 1,500μm2. The very low power consumption makes the proposed circuits very well suited for energy-harvested systems-on-chip for Internet of Things applications.

I. VLSI Systems: A Glance Into The Last Decades Since their inception in 1970s, VLSI systems have enabled several new technological capabilities and made them accessible to an unceasingly wider range of users, reaching a scale that has been exponentially increasing over the decades[1](seeFig. 1). Relentless integration of more complex systems has driven such remarkable evolution, as made possible by the inexorable miniaturization. As shown inFig. 1, more functionality has been crammed in a consistently smaller form factor, as exemplified by the physical volume shrinking of computers by 100 X/decade[2],[3]. At the same time, the energy per task has been decreasing at 10–100 X/decade, as shown inFig. 2, for several systems and system-on-chip subsystems[4]. This allowed packing more capabilities into the same power envelope, as generally observed in the electronic systems, even before the advent of the integrated circuit[5].

A novel rail-to-rail dynamic voltage comparator is presented in this paper. The proposed circuit is fully synthesizable, as it can be designed with automated digital design flows and standard cells, and can operate at very low voltages down to deep sub-threshold. Post-layout simulations show correct operation for rail-to-rail common-mode inputs at a supply voltageVDDdown to 0.3 V. At such voltage, the input offset voltage standard deviation is less than 28 mV (8 mV) over the rail-to-rail common-mode input range (aroundVDD/2). The digital nature of the comparator and its ability to operate down to deep sub-threshold voltages allow its full integration with standard-cell digital circuits in terms of both design and voltage domain. The ease of design, the low area and the voltage scalability make the proposed comparator very well suited for sensor nodes, integrated circuits for the Internet of Things and related applications.

The interference between switching mode power converters and wireline digital communications is addressed in this paper and the impact on communication errors of different Spread Spectrum (SS) modulation techniques, which are commonly used in power convertors to comply with EMC regulations, is experimentally investigated in a particular case. Experimental results do not highlight significant differences in terms of communication error rate induced in the victim data line between power converters featuring conventional and SS pulse width modulations.