IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Spring 2020 - 102

will impact the industry and how ARM
will respond.
-Denis Daly

The Smartest Designer in
the Universe
■■

■■

Organizers: Massimo Alioto, National University of Singapore; Denis
Daly, Omni Design Technologies,
Massachusetts; Tinoosh Mohsenin,
University of Maryland; Alex Moreno, University of California, Berkeley;
Mandy Pantel, Intel; Tim Piessens, ICsense, Belgium; Mahmoud Sawaby,
Stanford University; Farhana Sheikh,
Intel; and Tom Van Breussegem, ICsense, Belgium
Moderator: Chris Mangelsdorf, Analog Devices, California
Panelists: Marco Berkhout, NXP
Semiconductors, The Netherlands;
Alison Burdett, Sensium Healthcare, United Kingdom; Alvin Loke,
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, California; Kenichi
Okada, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan; Drew Hall, University

C IRCU IT INTU ITIONS

The Smartest Designer in the Universe quiz show participants on stage.

of California, San Diego; and Filip
Tavernier, KU Leuven, Belgium.
Good silicon engineering is like
practicing sports on an Olympic
scale. Be the best and be known
being the best. But who is actually the
smartest designer in the universe?
Who is capable of combining endless
creativity with superb knowledge and
insight? And where will we find this
person: in industry or in academia? Or
will the students rise up and show the
former generation their tail?
In this interactive quiz show host-
-ed by the always entertaining Chris

vout

PD
Model

vout

gm (1 + A)∆v

∆v

-A∆v
gm (1 + A)∆v

PD
Model

-A∆v

∆v

-A
VB2

Biasing
Transistor

M3
VB2

Biasing
Transistor

(a)

(b)

FIGURE 5: (a) A schematic of a regulated-cascode TIA using a voltage amplifier with negative
gain. (b) A common-source amplifier is used to implement the voltage amplifier.

current being received from the PD.
As an example, the root-mean-square
noise current created by the TIA at

102

S P R I N G 2 0 2 0

-Denis Daly

(continued from p. 13)

Mangelsdorf, three teams representing industry, academia, and students
competed for the honor and the
prestigious title: "Smartest Designer
in the Universe." In several rounds,
the contestants solved questions and
puzzles covering all parts of electrical
engineering. The audience was also
able to participate and try to answer
questions correctly using a mobile app.
In the end, industry won the event, but
students and academia vowed to come
back in the future to get revenge!

its input can be on the order of 4 nA.
To have a low bit error rate, we must
ensure that the input signal to the

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

TIA is much higher than this value
for the receiver. We will discuss the
noise considerations in more detail
in a future article of this series.
In summary, a TIA is a two-port
device that converts an input current in
one port to an output voltage in another
port. A TIA is expected to have a low
input impedance, so as to absorb all
the current produced by the PD, and
a high output impedance, so as to
have a high gain. We reviewed two
TIA designs in this article, one using a
simple common-gate amplifier and one
using a regulated-cascode amplifier.

References

[1] A. Sheikholeslami, "Transfer resistor,"
IEEE Solid State Circuits Mag., vol. 11,
no. 1, pp. 7-9, Winter 2019. doi: 10.1109/
MSSC.2018.2881859.
[2] A. Sheikholeslami, "Looking into a node,"
IEEE Solid State Circuits Mag., vol. 6, no.
2, pp. 8-10, Spring 2014. doi: 10.1109/
MSSC.2014.2315062.

IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Spring 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Spring 2020