Um Process Technology Research Articles

High Speed Back-Bias Voltage (VBB) Generator with Improved Pumping Current

Due to the advance of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) technologies with the steadfast increase of density with aggressively scaled storage capacitors, the supply voltage has been lowered to under 1 V to reduce power consumption. The above progress has been accompanied by the increasingly difficult task of sensing cell data reliably. One of the essential methods to preserve sustainable data retention characteristic is to curtail the sub-threshold leakage current by using a negative voltage bias for the bulk of access transistors. This negative back-bias is generated by a back-bias voltage generator. This paper proposes a novel high-speed back-bias voltage (VBB) generator with a cross-coupled hybrid pumping scheme. The conventional circuit uses one fixed voltage to control the gates of discharge of the p-channel metal oxide semiconductor (PMOS) and transfer n-channel metal oxide semiconductor (NMOS), respectively. However, the proposed circuit adds an auxiliary pump, thereby able to control more aptly with a lower negative voltage when discharging and a higher positive voltage when transferring. As a result, the proposed circuit achieves a faster pump-down speed and higher pumping current at a lower supply voltage compared to conventional circuits. The H-simulation program with integrated circuit emphasis (HSPICE) simulation results with the Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company (TSMC) 0.18 um process technology indicates that the proposed circuit has about a 20% faster pump-down speed at a supply voltage of voltage common collector (VCC) = 1.2 V and about 3% higher pumping current at VBB from −0.6 V to −1 V with the ability to generate a near 3% higher ratio of |VBB|/VCC at VCC = 0.6 V compared to conventional circuits. Hence, the proposed circuit is extremely suitable and promising for future low-power and high-performance DRAM applications.

HEVC CABAC 복호화기의 이진 산술 복호화기 설계

HEVC CABAC의 이진 산술 복호화기는 정규, 우회, 종료의 세 가지 복호화 모드에 따라 동작하고 각 모드에 따라 복호화 동작과 시간에 많은 차이가 있다. 또한 재정규화를 진행하게 되면 내부에서 피드백 루프가 발생하여 지연 시간이 길어지게 된다. 본 논문에서는 이를 해결하기 위해 재정규화가 일어날 수 있는 모든 range 값의 범위를 미리 체크하여 정규화가 일어나면 바로 range 값을 업데이트하고 모든 계산을 한 사이클 안에 수행할 수 있도록 설계하였다. 0.18 um 공정에서 구현된 이진 산술 복호화기의 최대 동작 속도는 215 MHz이며 크기는 5,423 게이트이다. HEVC CABAC binary arithmetic decoder operates in three decoding modes i.e. regular, bypass, and termination modes, where their decoding operations and time differ a lot. Furthermore, when renormalization occurs, its internal feedback loop induces large delay. In this paper, a binary arithmetic decoder was designed to solve this problem. In advance, it checks all range values with possible renormalization. When renormalization occurs, it immediately updates range value and finishes all calculation in a cycle. When implemented in 0.18 um process technology, its maximum operating frequency and gate counts are 215 MHz and 5,423 gates, respectively.

Design of Low Power, High Gain PLL using CS-VCO on 180nm Technology

This paper investigates the design and performance of the PLL (Phase Locked Loop). The proposed PLL designed with PFD (Phase Frequency Detector), CP (Charge Pump), first order Low Pass Filter and CS-VCO (Current Starved-Voltage Control Oscillator), in this paper the designed PFD used for proposed PLL is free from dead zone. The VCO used for the designed PLL shows larger tuning range and high gain as compares to previous work, i.e. tuning range (167MHz – 1.711GHz) and VCO gain (2.21GHz/V or 13.875*10 radians/s*V). In the proposed work, the designed PLL has higher pull-in range 950MHz (50MHz – 1GHz) with maximum jitter 9.8ps. Power dissipation for proposed PLL system is low, i.e. 277.2 μW with maximum pull-in time is 265ns at 1GHz. The proposed PLL circuit is implemented on CADENCE UMC0.18um process technology file with supply voltage 1.8V. All simulations are done using cadence spectre simulator.

A 12-bit Hybrid Digital Pulse Width Modulator

In this paper, a 12-bit high resolution, power and area efficiency hybrid digital pulse width modulator (DPWM) with process and temperature (PT) calibration has been proposed for digital controlled DC-DC converters. The hybrid structure of DPWM combines a 6-bit differential tapped delay line ring-mux digital-to-time converter (DTC) schema and a 6-bit counter-comparator DTC schema, resulting in a power and area saving solution. Furthermore, since the 6-bit differential delay line ring oscillator serves as the clock to the high 6-bit counter-comparator DTC, a high frequency clock is eliminated, and the power is significantly saved. In order to have a simple delay cell and flexible delay time controllability, a voltage controlled inverter is adopted to build the deferential delay cell, which allows fine-tuning of the delay time. The PT calibration circuit is composed of process and temperature monitors, two 2-bit flash ADCs and a lookup table. The monitor circuits sense the PT (Process and Temperature) variations, and the flash ADC converts the data into a digital code. The complete circuits design has been verified under different corners of CMOS 0.18um process technology node.

Design and implementation of a high-throughput fully parallel complex-valued QR factorisation chips

Complex QR factorisation is a fundamental operation used in various applications such as adaptive beamforming and MIMO signal detection. In this paper, based on Givens rotation scheme, a high-throughput, fully parallel complex-valued QR factorisation (CQRF) design is presented. It features the lowest computing complexity in various factorising schemes and indicates no BER performance loss when applied to a MIMO signal detection system. Via carefully plotted scheduling, one CQRF computation can be completed in eight clock cycles. In hardware design, a low complexity and look-up-table-free CORDIC algorithm is employed to implement the rotation operations. Further design optimisations, such as hardware sharing of common modules and reduction of register usage by shortening the variable's life span, are also applied. Sized 2×2 and 4×4 chip designs largely following the IEEE 802.11n standard are developed. The implementation results in TSMC 0.18 um process technology show that the proposed 4×4 design, with a gate count of only 134.6 K, is capable of performing 15 M CQRFs per second. The measured power consumption is 196.3 mW at 120 MHz. Compound performance indexes such as area-time product and energy consumption per CQRF also indicate significant performance edges of the proposed designs.

Analysis of the electrical characteristics of SCR-based ESD Protection Device (PTSCR) in 0.13/0.18/0.35um process technology

In this paper, an experimental analysis of the electrical characteristics of the PTSCR was conducted. The PTSCR contains a high trigger current and a holding voltage that enables latch-up immune during normal operation. The PTSCR in each process technology is verified by the TLP system as well as a hot chuck controller. The experimental results show that the trigger current and holding voltage are higher than that of other SCR devices. At higher temperatures, the holding voltage of the PTSCR decreased due to the operation mechanism of the SCR, while the trigger current increased due to the MOSFET trigger mechanism.

Increased Scalability and Power Efficiency by Using Multiple Speed Pipelines

One of the most important problems faced by microarchitecture designers is the poor scalability of some of the current solutions with increased clock frequencies and wider pipelines. As several studies show, internal processor structures scale differently with decreasing device sizes. While in some cases the access latency is determined by the speed of the logic circuitry, for others it is dominated by the interconnect delay. Furthermore, while some stages can be super-pipelined with relatively small performance loss, others must be kept atomic. This paper proposes a possible solution to this problem, avoiding the traditional trade-off between parallelism and clock speed. First, allowing instructions to enter and leave the Issue Window in an asynchronously manner enables faster speeds in the front-end at the expense of small synchronization latencies. Second, using an Execution Cache for storing instructions that are already scheduled allows for bypassing the issue circuitry and thus clocking the execution core at higher frequencies. Combined, these two mechanisms result in a 50% to 60% performance increase for our test microarchitecture, without requiring a completely new scheduling mechanism. Furthermore, the proposed microarchitecture requires significantly less energy, with 30% reduction in a 0.13um or 20% in a 0.06um process technology over the original baseline.