Gordon Moore, in his seminal article in 1965, made a projection that the number of transistors on a chip will increase exponentially over the years. This projection is now known as Moore’s law. In the very same paper, he also listed anticipated challenges for sustaining such phenomenal growth in the level of integration. Those included excessive power dissipation and unmanageable design complexity/cost. More than 40 years later, Moore’s concerns have come true. Those are the key challenges that IC designers are facing today.
Our overall research objective is to address these challenges with unique mixed-signal system approaches. Our research efforts can be classified into the following three categories:
- Continue on the design of energy-efficient, high-performance digital I/O interfaces through mixed-signal architectures combining both strengths of analog and digital.
- Pioneer in the area of analog/mixed-signal design and verification methodologies to facilitate efficient design and reuse despite aggressive technology scaling.
- Explore new applications where mixed-signal approaches can benefit: for instance, nano/bio/medical sensor interfaces and power electronics.
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High-Performance, Low-Power Interconnects
- High-speed transceivers and serializer/deserializers
- Precise timing generation circuits (PLL/DLLs)
- Clock and data recovery loops (CDRs)
Design and Validation Methodologies for Analog and Mixed-Signal Systems
- Leveraging linear abstraction to simplify analog verification
- Intent-based design methodologies: circuit optimization, modeling, and coverage analysis
- Verifying if intent is realized properly: e.g. global convergence analysis
- Enabling robust design of mixed-signal "A+D" systems
CircuitBook: a shared repository of analog circuit blocks
Exploring New Areas based on Our Expertise
- Systems traditionally designed based on ADC and DSP: sensor interfaces and smart power ICs
- Adopt the unique "A+D" systems in high-speed links to achieve high performance and low power
- Integrated mixed-domain systems: e.g. bio-sensors, power converters, silicon photonics, etc.