Introduction to the special issue “2011 International Analog VLSI Workshop”

Abstract

This special issue of the SPRINGER Journal of Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing is published with 9 papers selected from presented papers at the 2011 International Analog VLSI Workshop (AVLSIWS2012). The conference was held in Bali, Indonesia on October 2–4, 2011. This conference was organized by the Research Committee on Electronic Circuits of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan (IEEJ) in cooperation with the Bandung Institute of Technology. The purpose of the conference is to exchange information, ideas and recent research results on analog VLSI circuits and their applications. The first 4 papers are related to power supply and power management circuits. The first paper by Eiichi et al. presents a low power wake-up receiver with CMOS operating in the subthreshold current region. The paper is focusing on the development of low-power envelope detector, highgain amplifier and PWM CDR. The fabricated detector and high-gain amplifier only consumes 6.8 lW from a 1.5-V power supply voltage. The second paper by Zachary et al. presents a design of boost regulator for energy harvesting applications. The proposed circuit uses two different control schemes for startup and steady-state operation. At the startup operation, a fixed-frequency oscillator is used to increase the output voltage up to sufficient level for steady state operation. At the steady state operation, a constant-on-time hysteretic control system is used to increase the efficiency. The proposed circuit can start up with an input voltage of 240 mV and achieve a maximum efficiency of 97 %. Toshiko discusses the design concepts of wireless sensor network system constructed with autonomous sensing nodes, which operates at extremely low power levels. The paper reviews a structure health-monitoring system, monitoring methodology with a focus on quantitative measurement accuracy, and issues of node synchronized sampling, multi-layer cluster, node distance and integrated sensor node module. Design example using a Wheatstone bridge strain sensor is demonstrated. Bin Shao presents a design of buck converter utilizing a low quiescent current PFM switching method. The proposed method improves the efficiency of the converter at a light load condition. An adaptive accurate zero-cross comparator for discontinuous mode and very low quiescent current circuit technique in skip period operation are introduced. The proposed circuit improves the efficiency at a 5-V input, 3-V output and 10-mA load by 60 % compared to a conventional circuit with PWM switching method. The fifth paper by Antaryami et al. presents a novel four quadrant voltage multiplier using bulk input for low-power low-voltage applications. The proposed circuit uses a current mirror operated in weak inversion region as an input stage where the bulk of MOSFETs are used as input terminals. The proposed circuit achieves a 5.8 % THD for 80 mV input voltage amplitude under 0.5 V power supply voltage. The power consumption of the proposed circuit is 714.3 nW. A. Yasuda Faculty of Science and Engineering, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Hosei University, 3-7-2 Kajino-cho, Koganei-city, Tokyo 184-8584, Japan e-mail: yasuda@hosei.ac.jp