STMicroelectronics

About: STMicroelectronics is a company organization based out in Geneva, Switzerland. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Signal & Transistor. The organization has 17172 authors who have published 29543 publications receiving 300766 citations. The organization is also known as: SGS-Thomson & STM.

Design and Scaling of W-Band SiGe BiCMOS VCOs

Abstract: This paper discusses the design of 77-106 GHz Colpitts VCOs fabricated in two generations of SiGe BiCMOS technology, with MOS and HBT varactors, and with integrated inductors. Based on a study of the optimal biasing conditions for minimum phase noise, it is shown that VCOs can be used to monitor the mm-wave noise performance of SiGe HBTs. Measurements show a 106 GHz VCO operating from 2.5 V with phase noise of -101.3 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset, which delivers +2.5 dBm of differential output power at 25degC, with operation verified up to 125degC. A BiCMOS VCO with a differential MOS-HBT cascode output buffer using 130 nm MOSFETs delivers +10.5 dBm of output power at 87 GHz.

Towards Performance Prediction of Compositional Models in Industrial GALS Designs

Abstract: Systems and Networks on Chips (NoCs) are a prime design focus of many hardware manufacturers. In addition to functional verification, which is a difficult necessity, the chip designers are facing extremely demanding performance prediction challenges, such as the need to estimate the latency of memory accesses over the NoC. This paper attacks this problem in the setting of designing globally asynchronous, locally synchronous systems (GALS). We describe foundations and applications of a combination of compositional modeling, model checking, and Markov process theory, to arrive at a viable approach to compute performance quantities directly on industrial, functionally verified GALS models.

An integrated hall•effect apparatus for detecting the position of a magnetic element

Abstract: For detecting the position of a magnetic element having a field component zeroing in at least one point in space, typically in a plane, a plurality of elementary Hall-effect sensors are integrated side by side and aligned in a direction perpendicular to the zeroing field component and to the current flowing through the elementary sensors. The elementary sensor generating a zero output voltage therefore indicates the zero position of the field component and consequently the position of the magnetic element with respect to the position sensor, so that The outputs of the elementary sensors provide a quantized numeric code indicating the position of the magnetic element.

Bus interface unit having dual purpose transaction buffer

Abstract: A bus interface unit includes a random-access transaction buffer and at least one pointer queue. The transaction buffer stores entries for both in-order transactions and combinable write transactions, and the pointer queue stores pointers to the buffer entries for in-order transactions so as to order the in-order transactions. When a received combinable write transaction has a writing address that falls within the address range of a stored combinable write transactions, the received transaction is merged with the stored transaction. Additionally, a method is provided for processing requested bus transactions. The bus interface unit determines if a requested transaction is a combinable write transaction. If not, address and data information for the requested transaction is loaded into an empty entry in a random-access buffer, and a pointer to that buffer entry is placed in a pointer queue. Alternatively, if the requested transaction is a combinable write transaction, the bus interface unit determines if the transaction's write address falls within the address range of a stored combinable write transaction. If so, the requested transaction is merged with the stored transaction. In a preferred embodiment, if the write address does not fall within the address range of any stored combinable write transaction, the data information for the requested transaction is loaded into an empty entry in the random-access buffer.