ECE Calendar

Abstract:
As CMOS technology shrinks, the transistor speed increases enabling higher speed communications and more complex systems. These benefits come at the cost of decreasing inherent device gain, increased transistor leakage currents, and additional mismatches due to process variations. All of these drawbacks affect the design of high-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) in nano-CMOS processes. To move towards an ADC topology useful in these small processes the K-Delta-1-Sigma (KD1S) modulator-based ADC was proposed. The KD1S topology employs inherent time-interleaving with a shared op-amp and K-quantizing paths and can achieve significantly higher conversion bandwidths when compared to the traditional delta-sigma ADCs. The 8-path KD1S modulator achieves an SNR of 58 dB (or 9.4-bits resolution) when clocked at 100 MHz for a conversion bandwidth of 6.25 MHz and an effective sampling rate equal to 800 MHz. The KD1S modulator has been fabricated in a 500 nm CMOS process and the experimental results are reported. Deficiencies in the first test chip performance are discussed along with their alleviation to achieve theoretical performance. .

Biography:
Russell Jacob (Jake) Baker (S’83-M’88-SM’97) was born in Ogden, Utah, on October 5, 1964. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 1986 and 1988. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Nevada, Reno in 1993.

From 1981 to 1987, he served in the United States Marine Corps Reserves. From 1985 to 1993, he worked for E. G. & G. Energy Measurements and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory designing nuclear diagnostic instrumentation for underground nuclear weapons tests at the Nevada test site. During this time he designed over 30 electronic and electro-optic instruments including high-speed (750 Mb/s) fiber-optic receiver/transmitters, PLLs, frame- and bit-syncs, data converters, streak-camera sweep circuits, micro-channel plate gating circuits, and analog oscilloscope electronics. From 1993 to 2000, he served on the faculty in the department of electrical engineering at the University of Idaho on the Boise State campus. In 2000, he joined a new electrical and computer engineering program at Boise State University, where he was department chair from 2004 to 2007. At Boise State he helped establish graduate programs in electrical and computer engineering including, in 2006, the university’s second PhD degree. Also, since 1993, he has consulted for various companies and laboratories including Amkor, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Micron, Nascentric, Rendition, Sun, and Tower. In addition, he does expert witness work through the Silicon Valley Expert Witness Group. His research interests lie in analog/mixed-signal integrated circuit design (combining analog circuit design with digital signal processing) and the design of memory/displays (arrays) in new and emerging fabrication technologies.

Professor Baker holds over 200 granted or pending patents in integrated circuit design. Among his inventions is the K-Delta-1-Sigma modulator topology used in the Baker analog-to-digital converter. He is a member of the electrical engineering honor society Eta Kappa Nu, a licensed Professional Engineer, and the author of the books CMOS: Circuit Design, Layout, and Simulation, CMOS: Mixed-Signal Circuit Design, and a coauthor of DRAM Circuit Design: Fundamental and High-Speed Topics. He received the 2000 Best Paper Award from the IEEE Power Electronics Society and the 2007 Frederick Emmons Terman Award.