Digital electronics

About: Digital electronics is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 10354 publications have been published within this topic receiving 153532 citations.

High-level simulation of substrate noise generation including power supply noise coupling

Abstract: Substrate noise caused by large digital circuits will degrade the performance of analog circuits located on the same substrate. To simulate this performance degradation, the total amount of generated substrate noise must be known. Simulating substrate noise generated by large digital circuits is however not feasible with existing circuit simulators and detailed substrate models due to the long simulation times and high memory requirements. We have developed a methodology to simulate this substrate noise generation at a higher level. Not only does this methodology take noise coupling from switching gates into account, but also noise coupling from the power supply is included. This paper describes this simulation methodology. In the paper it is shown that the high-level simulations correspond very well with SPICE simulations and that a large gain in simulation speed is obtained. This high-level simulation methodology makes it possible to predict substrate noise generation of large digital circuits in a very efficient way, early in the design flow of mixed-signal ASICs.

Impact of Layout on 90nm CMOS Process Parameter Fluctuations

Abstract: A test chip has been built to study the effects of layout on the delay and leakage of digital circuits in 90nm CMOS. The delay is characterized through the spread of ring oscillator frequencies and the transistor leakage is measured by using an on-chip ADC

Demonstration of reconfigurable electro-optical logic with silicon photonic integrated circuits

Abstract: We demonstrate a scalable and reconfigurable optical directed-logic architecture consisting of a regular array of integrated optical switches based on microring resonators. The switches are controlled by electrical input logic signals through embedded p-i-n junctions. The circuit can be reconfigured to perform any combinational logic operation by thermally tuning the operation modes of the switches. Here we show experimentally a directed logic circuit based on a 2×2 array of switches. The circuit is reconfigured to perform arbitrary two-input logic functions.

Communication interface connecting binary logic unit through a trinary logic transmission channel

Abstract: A communications interface for transferring data from a first binary logic circuit to a second binary logic circuit by using a trinary logic transmission channel. The first set of binary logic signals is converted into a first set of binary control signals which, in turn, control trinary drivers connected to the transmission channel. The trinary drivers drive the transmission channel to one of three discrete voltage levels as opposed to one of two levels in binary systems. Trinary receivers are located on the second binary logic circuit and are connected to the trinary transmission channel. The receivers produce a second set of binary control signals which are translated into a second set of binary logic signals for use by the second binary logic circuit.