The UCL/ICTEAM IEEE Student Branch along with prof. David Bol is glad to invite you to the following seminar :
Time-based sensor interface circuits: hype or promise?
given by Jelle Van Rethy, former Ph.D. Researcher at KU Leuven and presently Analog Design Engineer at Melexis Microelectronic Integrated Systems.
The event will be held on Monday 20th of April 2015 at 2:00 pm in Barbe 10 auditorium.
Abstract:
The ever increasing demand for improved autonomy drives the search for new energy-efficient sensor interface topologies in CMOS technology. Recently, time-based conversion has gained a lot of interest due to its high potential to implement highly-digital circuitry. While voltage-based analog integrated circuits suffer from the decreased supply voltage and voltage swing in highly scaled CMOS technologies, time-based processing takes advantage of the increased timing resolution. However, how do these timebased sensor interface circuits compare to their amplitude-based counterparts fundamentally? To answer this question, theoretical limits are derived in this presentation for both implementations, which shows that the sensor itself is actually the dominant factor in limiting the achievable energy efficiency. Time-based topologies, however, enable to implement highly-digital interfaces, which are scalable, area-efficient and have lowvoltage potential. These observations are illustrated with several practical designs.