Associate Prof. Soon-Jyh Chang of Department of Electrical Engineering
at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Tainan, Taiwan, has led a
research team of doctoral students to develop three advanced circuit
design techniques, which can consume the lowest energy in the world and
save 80% of energy in comparison to the traditional design techniques.
The three circuit design techniques raised by the research team include
monotonic capacitor switching procedure, binary-scaled error
compensation method and binary-scaled error compensation method, which
are able to improve the operating speed and achieve excellent energy
efficiency.
With the first technique, the monotonic capacitor switching procedure,
the average switching energy and total sampling capacitance are reduced
by about 81.3% and 50%, respectively, compared to converters which use
the conventional procedure.
The second technique, the binary-scaled error compensation method, can
compensate for the DAC settling error since the DAC settling issue
limits the operating speed of a SAR ADC, and it can perform comparison
before the DAC is completely settled, resulting in improved operating
speed.
The third technique, the binary-scaled error compensation method, uses a
predictive circuit to avoid unnecessary switching in a DAC network,
saves 40% to 45% switching energy and improves static and dynamic
performance of a SAR ADC. Combined with the first technique, the average
switching energy is reduced by about 90% than the conventional one.
The research achievements of the three design techniques have been
published in international conferences, including IEEE International
Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), the Oscar of the field of
Integrated Circuit, Symposium VLSI Circuits, and DAC.
Applying the techniques, the research team of NCKU Department of
Electrical Engineering, including the leader, Chun-Cheng Liu, and team
members, Ying-Ju Lin and Kuan-Ying Huang, supervised by Associate Prof.
Soon-Jyh Chang, has won the only Golden Jury Award with their design of
high-speed high-energy-efficiency successive-approximation-register
analog-to-digital converters and has received the prize of NT$150,000
from Mr. Yuan-Tseh Lee, honorary dean of Academic Sinica.
The 2010 Macronix Golden Silicon Awards, a contest on the application
and design of semiconductors, is an important benchmarking contest for
both industries and National Cheng Kung University, primarily based on
scientific and technological originality and the value of semiconductors
in terms of their application.
Source: Business Wire
