A background investigation of the total-dose radiation tolerance of a third generation complementary SiGe:C BiCMOS technology platform was performed. Tolerance was quantified under proton and X-ray radiation sources for both the npn and pnp HBT, as well as for an operational amplifier built with these devices. Furthermore, a technique known as junction isolation radiation hardening was proposed and tested with the goal of improving the SEE sensitivity of the npn by reducing the charge collected by the subcollector in the event of a direct ion strike. Three independent systems were designed, including: 1) a charge amplification channel developed as part of a remote electronics unit for the lunar environment, 2) variable bias circuitry for a self-healing radar receiver, and 3) an ultra-fast x-ray detector for picosecond scale time-domain measurements of evolving chemical reactions. The first two projects capitalized on the wide-temperature performance and radiation tolerance of the SiGe HBT, allowing them to operate under extreme environmental conditions reliably and consistently. The third design makes use of the high-frequency capabilities of the HBT, particularly in emitter-coupled logic (ECL) configurations. Findings concerning the performance of these systems and implications for future research are discussed.

A thesis submitted in ful lment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering May 2016 / Modern electrical networks provide an opportunity for inevitable interaction between metal oxide arresters and power system harmonics. Therefore, these arrester devices are continuously exposed to the combined e ect of distorted system voltage and envi- ronmental thermal stresses. Recent studies supported by eld experiments have shown signi cant rise in the leakage current through these surge arrester devices when exposed to ac voltage with harmonics. However, the major shortcoming in the current knowledge and applications of varistor arresters resides on the reliability and the electrical stabil- ity of these overvoltage protection units, when subjected to long-term and continuous distorted ac voltage and thermal stresses from the environment. Commercially-sourced ZnO arresters of similar size and electrical properties are tested using standard ac accelerated degradation procedure or electro-thermal ageing test. The times to degradation, the coe cient of non-linearity, the reference voltages, as well as the clamping voltage measured are used to analyse the reliability and the electrical stability of the metal oxide-based arrester samples. The resistive component of the leakage current is extracted from the measured total leakage current. The three-parameter Weibull probability model is invoked in order to analyze the degradation phenomenon. / MT2016

Yip Kim-fung. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 95-100). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.I / Acknowledgement --- p.III / Table of Contents --- p.IV / Chapter Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Motivation --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Objective --- p.6 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- Theory of Oscillators --- p.7 / Chapter 2.1 --- Oscillator Design --- p.7 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- Loop-Gain Method --- p.7 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Negative Resistance-Conductance Method --- p.8 / Chapter 2.1.3 --- Crossed-Coupled Oscillator --- p.10 / Chapter Chapter 3 --- Noise Analysis --- p.15 / Chapter 3.1 --- Origin of Noise Sources --- p.16 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- Flicker Noise --- p.16 / Chapter 3.1.2 --- Thermal Noise --- p.17 / Chapter 3.1.3 --- Noise Model of Varactor --- p.18 / Chapter 3.1.4 --- Noise Model of Spiral Inductor --- p.19 / Chapter 3.2 --- Derivation of Resonator --- p.19 / Chapter 3.3 --- Phase Noise Model --- p.22 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Leeson's Model --- p.23 / Chapter 3.3.2 --- Phase Noise Model defined by J. Cranincks and M Steyaert --- p.24 / Chapter 3.3.3 --- Non-linear Analysis of Phase Noise --- p.26 / Chapter 3.3.4 --- Flicker-Noise Upconversion Mechanism --- p.31 / Chapter 3.4 --- Phase Noise Reduction Techniques --- p.33 / Chapter 3.4.1 --- Conventional Tank Circuit Structure --- p.33 / Chapter 3.4.2 --- Enhanced Q tank circuit Structure --- p.35 / Chapter 3.4.3 --- Tank Circuit with parasitics --- p.37 / Chapter 3.4.4 --- Reduction of Up-converted Noise --- p.39 / Chapter Chapter 4 --- CMOS Technology and Device Modeling --- p.42 / Chapter 4.1 --- Device Modeling --- p.42 / Chapter 4.1.1 --- FET model --- p.42 / Chapter 4.1.2 --- Layout of Interdigitated FET --- p.46 / Chapter 4.1.3 --- Planar Inductor --- p.48 / Chapter 4.1.4 --- Circuit Model of Planar Inductor --- p.50 / Chapter 4.1.5 --- Inductor Layout Consideration --- p.54 / Chapter 4.1.6 --- CMOS RF Varactor --- p.55 / Chapter 4.1.7 --- Parasitics of PMOS-type varactor --- p.57 / Chapter Chapter 5 --- Design of Integrated CMOS VCOs --- p.59 / Chapter 5.1 --- 1.5GHz CMOS VCO Design --- p.59 / Chapter 5.1.1 --- Equivalent circuit model of differential LC VCO --- p.59 / Chapter 5.1.2 --- Reference Oscillator Circuit --- p.61 / Chapter 5.1.3 --- Proposed Oscillator Circuit --- p.62 / Chapter 5.1.4 --- Output buffer --- p.63 / Chapter 5.1.5 --- Biasing Circuitry --- p.64 / Chapter 5.2 --- Spiral Inductor Design --- p.65 / Chapter 5.3 --- Determination of W/L ratio of FET --- p.67 / Chapter 5.4 --- Varactor Design --- p.68 / Chapter 5.5 --- Layout (Cadence) --- p.69 / Chapter 5.6 --- Circuit Simulation (SpectreRF) --- p.74 / Chapter Chapter 6 --- Experimental Results and Discussion --- p.76 / Chapter 6.1 --- Measurement Setup --- p.76 / Chapter 6.2 --- Measurement results: Reference Oscillator Circuit --- p.81 / Chapter 6.2.1 --- Output Spectrum --- p.81 / Chapter 6.2.2 --- Phase Noise Performance --- p.82 / Chapter 6.2.3 --- Tuning Characteristic --- p.83 / Chapter 6.2.4 --- Microphotograph --- p.84 / Chapter 6.3 --- Measurement results: Proposed Oscillator Circuit --- p.85 / Chapter 6.3.1 --- Output Spectrum --- p.85 / Chapter 6.3.2 --- Phase Noise Performance --- p.86 / Chapter 6.3.3 --- Tuning Characteristic --- p.87 / Chapter 6.3.4 --- Microphotograph --- p.88 / Chapter 6.4 --- Comparison of Measured Results --- p.89 / Chapter 6.4.1 --- Phase Noise Performance --- p.89 / Chapter 6.4.2 --- Tuning Characteristic --- p.90 / Chapter Chapter 7 --- Conclusion and Future Work --- p.93 / Chapter 7.1 --- Conclusion --- p.93 / Chapter 7.2 --- Future Work --- p.94 / References --- p.95 / Author's Publication --- p.100 / Appendix A --- p.101 / Appendix B --- p.104 / Appendix C --- p.106

The global market of mobile and wireless communications is witnessing explosive growth in size as well as radical changes. Third generation (3G) wireless systems have recently been deployed and some are still in the process. 3G wireless systems promise integration of voice and data communications with higher data rates and a superior quality of service compared to second generation systems. Unfortunately, more and more communication standards continue to be developed which ultimately requires specific RF/MW and baseband communication integrated circuits that are designed for functionality and compatibility with a specific type of network. Although communication devices such as cellular phones integrate different services such as voice, Bluetooth, GPS, and WLAN, each service requires its own dedicated radio transceiver which results in high power consumption and larger PCB area usage. With the rapid advances in silicon CMOS integrated circuit technology combined with extensive research, a global solutionswhich aims at introducing a global communication system that encompasses all communication standards appears to be emerging. State of the art CMOS technology not only has the capability of operation in the GHz range, but it also provides the advantage of low cost and high level of integration. These features propel CMOS technology as the ideal candidate for current trends, which currently aim to integrate more RF/MW circuits on the same chip. Armed with such technology ideas such as software radio look more attainable than they ever were in the past. Unfortunately, realizing true software radio for mobile applications still remains a tremendous challenge since it requires a high sampling rate and a wide-bandwidth Analog-to-Digital converter which is extremely power hungry and not suitable for battery operated mobile devices. Another approach to realize a flexible and reconfigurable RF/MW transceiver that could operate in a diverse mobile environment and provides a multiband and multistandard solution. The work presented in this thesis focuses on the design of an integrated and tunable low-noise amplifier as part of software defined radio (SDR).

Thesis. 1977. M.S.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ENGINEERING. / Includes bibliographical references. / M.S.

Fluorescence microscopy is a powerful imaging technique used in the biological sciences to identify labeled components of a sample with specificity. This is usually accomplished through labeling with fluorescent dyes, isolating these dyes by their spectral signatures with optical filters, and recording the intensity of the fluorescent response. Although these techniques are widely used, fluorescence intensity images can be negatively affected by a variety of factors that impact the fluorescence intensity. Fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) is an imaging technique that is relatively immune to intensity fluctuations and also provides the unique ability to directly monitor the microenvironment surrounding a fluorophore. Despite the benefits associated with FLIM, the applications to which it is applied are fairly limited due to long image acquisition times and high cost of traditional hardware. Recent advances in complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) have enabled the design of low-cost imaging arrays that are capable of recording lifetime images with acquisition times greater than one order of magnitude faster than existing systems. However, these SPAD arrays have yet to realize the full potential of the technology due to limitations in their ability to handle the vast amount of data generated during the commonly used time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC) lifetime imaging technique. This thesis presents the design, implementation, characterization, and demonstration of a high speed FLIM imaging system. The components of this design include a CMOS imager chip in a standard 0.13 μm technology containing a custom CMOS SPAD, a 64-by-64 array of these SPADs, pixel control circuitry, independent time-to-digital converters (TDCs), a FLIM specific datapath, and high bandwidth output buffers. In addition to the CMOS imaging array, a complete system was designed and implemented using a printed circuit board (PCB) for capturing data from the imager, creating histograms for the photon arrival data using field-programmable gate arrays, and transferring the data to a computer using a cabled PCIe interface. Finally, software is used to communicate between the imaging system and a computer.The dark count rate of the SPAD was measured to be only 231 Hz at room temperature while maintaining a photon detection probability of up to 30\%. TDCs included on the array have a 62.5 ps resolution and a 64 ns range, which is suitable for measuring the lifetime of most biological fluorophores. Additionally, the on-chip datapath was designed to handle continuous data transfers at rates capable of supporting TCSPC-based lifetime imaging at 100 frames per second. The system level implementation also provides sufficient data throughput for transferring up to 750 frames per second from the imaging system to a computer. The lifetime imaging system was characterized using standard techniques for evaluating SPAD performance and an electrical delay signal for measuring the TDC performance. This thesis concludes with a demonstration of TCSPC-FLIM imaging at 100 frames per second -- the fastest 64-by-64 TCSPC FLIM that has been demonstrated. This system overcomes some of the limitations of existing FLIM systems and has the potential to enable new application domains in dynamic FLIM imaging.

Cellular and mobile communication markets, together with CMOS technology scaling, have made complex systems-on-chip integrated circuits (ICs) ubiquitous. Moving towards the internet of things that aims to extend this further requires ultra-low power and efficient radio communication that continues to take advantage of nanoscale CMOS processes. At the heart of this lie orthogonal challenges in both system and circuit architectures of current day technology. By enabling transceivers at center frequencies ranging in several tens of GHz, modern CMOS processes support bandwidths of up to several GHz. However, conventional narrowband architectures cannot directly translate or trade-off these speeds to lower power consumption. Pulse-radio UWB (PR-UWB), a fundamentally different system of communication enables this trade-off by bit-level duty-cycling i.e., power-gating and has emerged as an alternative to conventional narrowband systems to achieve better energy efficiency. However, system-level challenges in the implementation of transceiver synchronization and duty-cycling have remained an open challenge to realize the ultra-low power numbers that PR-UWB promises. Orthogonally, as CMOS scaling continues, approaching 28nm and 14nm in production digital processes, the key transistor characteristics have rapidly changed. Changes in supply voltage, intrinsic gain and switching speeds have rendered conventional analog circuit design techniques obsolete, since they do not scale well with the digital backend engines that dictate scaling. Consequently, circuit architectures that employ time-domain processing and leverage the faster switching speeds have become attractive. However, they are fundamentally limited by their inability to support linear domain-to-domain conversion and hence, have remained un-suited to high-performance applications. Addressing these requirements in different dimensions, two pulse-radio UWB receiver and a continuous-time filter silicon prototypes are presented in this work. The receiver prototypes focus on system level innovation while the filter serves as a demonstration vehicle for novel circuit architectures developed in this work. The PR-UWB receiver prototypes are implemented in a 65nm LP CMOS technology and are fully integrated solutions. The first receiver prototype is a compact UWB receiver front end operating at 4.85GHz that is aggressively duty-cycled. It occupies an active area of only 0.4 mm², thanks to the use of few inductors and RF G_m-C filters and incorporates an automatic-threshold-recovery-based demodulator for digitization. The prototype achieves a sensitivity of -88dBm at a data rate of 1Mbps (for a BER of 10^-3), while achieving the lowest energy consumption gradient (dP/df_data=450pJ/bit) amongst other receivers operating in the lower UWB band, for the same sensitivity. However, this prototype is limited by idle-time power consumption (e.g., bias) and lacks synchronization capability. A fully self-duty-cycled and synchronized UWB pulse-radio receiver SoC targeted at low-data-rate communication is presented as the second prototype. The proposed architecture builds on the automatic-threshold-recovery-based demodulator to achieve synchronization using an all-digital clock and data recovery loop. The SoC synchronizes with the incoming pulse stream from the transmitter and duty-cycles itself. The SoC prototype achieves a -79.5dBm, 1Mbps-normalized sensitivity for a >5X improvement over the state of the art in power consumption (375pJ/bit), thanks to aggressive signal path and bias circuit duty-cycling. The SoC is fully integrated to achieve RF-in to bit-out operation and can interface with off-chip, low speed digital components. Finally, switched-mode signal processing, a signal processing paradigm that enables the design of highly linear, power-efficient feedback amplifiers is presented. A 0.6V continuous-time filter prototype that demonstrates the advantages of this technique is presented in a 65nm GP CMOS process. The filter draws 26.2mW from the supply while operating at a full-scale that is 73% of the V_dd, a bandwidth of 70MHz and a peak signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio (SNDR) of 55.8dB. This represents a 2-fold improvement in full-scale and a 10-fold improvement in the bandwidth over state-of-the-art filter implementations, while demonstrating excellent linearity and signal-to-noise ratio. To sum up, innovations spanning both system and circuit architectures that leverage the speeds of nanoscale CMOS processes to enable power-efficient solutions to next-generation wireless receivers are presented in this work.

Point functionalized carbon nanotubes have recently demonstrated the ability to serve as single-molecule biosensors. Operating as single-molecule Field-Effect Transistors (smFET), the sensors have been used to explore activity ranging in scope from DNA hybridization kinetics to DNA polymerase functionality. High signal levels and an all-electronic label-free transduction mechanism make the smFET an attractive candidate for next-generation medical diagnostics platforms and high-bandwidth basic science research studies. In this work, carbon nanotubes are integrated onto a custom designed CMOS chip. Integration enables arraying many devices for measurement, providing the requisite scale-up for any commercial application of smFETs. Integration also provides substantial benefits towards achieving high bandwidths through the reduction of electrical parasitics. In a first exploitation of these high-bandwidth measurement capabilities, integrated devices are electrically characterized over a 1-MHz bandwidth. Functionalization through electrochemical oxidation of the devices is observed with microsecond temporal resolution, revealing complex reaction pathways with resolvable scattering signatures. High rate random telegraph noise (RTN) is observed in certain oxidized devices, further illustrating the temporal resolution of the integrated sensing platform.

by Cheng King Sum Frankie. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 53). / Acknowledgments --- p.iv / List of Figures --- p.vii / List of Tables --- p.ix / Abstract --- p.x / Chapter Chapter1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Multiple Clock System --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Clock Multiplier --- p.2 / Phase-Locked Loop --- p.2 / Delay Locked Loop --- p.3 / Chapter 1.3 --- Objective --- p.5 / Chapter Chapter2 --- All-Digital Clock Multiplier --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1 --- Architecture --- p.6 / Chapter 2.2 --- Operation --- p.7 / Chapter 2.3 --- Implementation --- p.9 / Control Circuit --- p.9 / Phase-Locked Circuit --- p.11 / Frequency Detector --- p.12 / Frequency Divider --- p.13 / Synchronize Logic --- p.14 / DCO Control --- p.15 / Chapter Chapter3 --- Digitally-Controlled Oscillator --- p.16 / Chapter 3.1 --- Principle --- p.16 / Chapter 3.2 --- Design --- p.18 / Transient Analysis --- p.18 / Simulation result --- p.26 / Chapter 3.3 --- Layout --- p.30 / Chapter 3.4 --- Summary --- p.32 / Chapter Chapter4 --- Test and Measurement --- p.34 / Chapter 4.1 --- Digitally-Controlled Oscillator Characteristics --- p.34 / Chapter 4.2 --- All-Digital Clock Multiplier Characteristics --- p.43 / Chapter Chapter5 --- Conclusions --- p.51 / Chapter 5.1 --- Summary --- p.51 / Chapter 5.2 --- Recommendation for Future Work --- p.52 / References --- p.53 / Appendix A --- p.54 / Publications and Presentations --- p.54

Energetic particles from cosmic ray or terrestrial sources can strike sensitive areas of CMOS devices and cause soft errors. Understanding the effects of such interactions is crucial as the device technology advances, and chip reliability has become more important than ever. Particle accelerator testing has been the standard method to characterize the sensitivity of chips to single event upsets (SEUs). However, because of their costs and availability limitations, other techniques have been explored. Pulsed laser has been a successful tool for characterization of SEU behavior, but to this day, laser has not been recognized as a comparable method to beam testing. In this thesis, I propose a methodology of correlating laser soft error rate (SER) to particle beam gathered data. Additionally, results are presented showing a temperature dependence of SER and the "neighbor effect" phenomenon where due to the close proximity of devices a "weakening effect" in the ON state can be observed.