The main objective of this thesis is to provide an overview of developments and issues in the context of the European debt crisis. Euro as a central aspect of Economic and Monetary Union has a major impact on convergence and existing systemic problems of the EU. The first chapter provides a brief description of the european integration since World War II in the context of Economic and Monetary union. The second chapter defines the concept of nominal and real convergence and dedicates closer to the Maastricht convergence criteria and the Stability and Growth Pact, which was the result of efforts towards closer fiscal coordination. Moreover, it summarizes the main causes of the financial crisis and subsequently analyses its impact on the EUR/USD currency pair. The fourth chapter focuses on the systemic weaknesses of the eurozone with an emphasis on the imbalance in the current account balance of payments. The last chapter summarizes the approaches to solving the debt crisis assuming that current steps taken by eurozone leaders in cooperation with the governments of intebted members fail.

Silicon carbide (SiC) integrated circuits (ICs) can enable the emergence of robust and reliable systems, including data acquisition and on-site control for extreme environments with high temperature and high radiation such as deep earth drilling, space and aviation, electric and hybrid vehicles, and combustion engines. In particular, SiC ICs provide significant benefit by reducing power dissipation and leakage current at temperatures above 300 °C compared to the Si counterpart. In fact, Si-based ICs have a limited maximum operating temperature which is around 300 °C for silicon on insulator (SOI). Owing to its superior material properties such as wide bandgap, three times larger than Silicon, and low intrinsic carrier concentration, SiC is an excellent candidate for high-temperature applications. In this thesis, analog and mixed-signal circuits have been implemented using SiC bipolar technology, including bandgap references, amplifiers, a master-slave comparator, an 8-bit R-2R ladder-based digital-to-analog converter (DAC), a 4-bit flash analog-to-digital converter (ADC), and a 10-bit successive-approximation-register (SAR) ADC. Spice models were developed at binned temperature points from room temperature to 500 °C, to simulate and predict the circuits’ behavior with temperature variation. The high-temperature performance of the fabricated chips has been investigated and verified over a wide temperature range from 25 °C to 500 °C. A stable gain of 39 dB was measured in the temperature range from 25 °C up to 500 °C for the inverting operational amplifier with ideal closed-loop gain of 40 dB. Although the circuit design in an immature SiC bipolar technology is challenging due to the low current gain of the transistors and lack of complete AC models, various circuit techniques have been applied to mitigate these problems. This thesis details the challenges faced and methods employed for device modeling, integrated circuit design, layout implementation and finally performance verification using on-wafer characterization of the fabricated SiC ICs over a wide temperature range. / <p>QC 20170905</p>