ESE Seminar: “Connecting Bits to the Physical World”

Analog, RF and power integrated circuits are the key connectors between the physical world and the digital or cyber world. In this talk I will give my perspective on broader research trends in analog integrated circuit design research and illustrate several of these trends with results from my research group. The analog circuit design discipline emerged in conjunction with electronics and as such has many decades of history. At the same time, electronics are constantly undergoing tremendous changes. In recent decades the key platform for integrated circuits has been CMOS. Under the impetus of Moore’s Law, CMOS transistors have scaled by orders of magnitude, which drove the necessity of a constant rejuvenation of analog design techniques. Innovations in analog design are an intricate interplay between novel devices, novel circuit paradigms and novel signal processing. Recently we have been experiencing a shift from traditional analog-to-digital conversion, to analog-to-information conversion (based on compressive sampling), and now to analog-to-feature conversion. This is an example of a top-down shift driven by changing application needs, in particular emerging machine-learning systems. Scaling transistors does not only allow for higher system integration, but also enables significant power reductions. Combining advanced transistors with novel circuit design paradigms encoding analog information in the time domain makes it now possible to design integrated circuits that require less than 1nanoW to operate. These innovations, in turn, create bottom-up opportunities for entirely new classes of systems, e.g., for the Internet of Things.