IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Spring 2020 - 65

DAVE BUSH PHOTOGRAPHY

Dr. Pui-In Mak (seated) answers students' questions after his talk.

DAVE BUSH PHOTOGRAPHY

His lecture included a detailed introduction of temperature sensor and
e-nose applications in the IoT context.
During the second part of his talk,
Dr. Bermak described the design of
CMOS image sensors. He gave a general review of imagers with different
pixel design architectures, including active pixel sensors, pulsewidth
modulation sensors, and addressevent-representation-based image
sensors. Based on test results, he
analyzed the advantages and disadvantages of the three kinds of
image sensors.
During the third day, Dr. Patrick
Yue, Hong Kong University of Science and Technolog y, presented
his lecture, "High-Speed Receiver
Circuits Design for NRZ and PAM4
Signaling." Dr. Yue introduced the
application of optical wireless communication in 5G during the morning session. He demonstrated some
interesting applications, including
various IC designs from his lab.
In the afternoon session, Dr. Yue
explained more technology details
and reviewed several state-of-art
receiver phased-locked loop (PLL)
circuits, focusing on high bandwidth, high energy efficiency, and
high speed. He introduced 32-Gb/s
low-power, low-jitter, four-level
pulse-amplitude-modulation clock
and data recovery and a 0.65-V,
12-16-GHz low-voltage subsampling
PLL (SSPLL). He showed the detailed
architecture of these two designs
to explain how to obtain low jitter
and power.
O n t h e s c h o ol 's fo u r t h d ay,
Dr. Pui-In Mak, University of Macau,
presented the lecture "UltralowPower Wireless Transceivers." In
the first part, Dr. Mak talked about
several practical techniques for
ultralow-power receivers, such as
current reuse, function reuse, and
ultralow voltage. He also discussed
the challenges of these techniques.
During the second part of the lec-

Dr. Xiang Gao presents his lecture, "High-Performance PLL Design for Wireless and Wireline
Communication Systems."

ture, Dr. Mak reviewed state-ofthe-art ultralow-power wireless
transceiver designs and discussed
the potential for single- and multiband standard applications as well
as their use in energy harvesting.
At the end of the lecture, he introduced the potential development
of radio-frequency techniques in
the IoT.
On the final day, Dr. Xiang Gao,
Zhejiang University, gave a lecture,
"High-Performance PLL Design for
Wireless and Wireline Communication Systems." He first emphasized
the importance of the PLL module
in a communication system design.
He then introduced the basic conceptions of PLL design and offered
a detailed analysis of the classic
charge-pump PLL structure. He also

pointed out that SSPLL features a
state-of-the-art figure of merit in the
literature. In the afternoon, Dr. Gao
presented four examples of highperformance PLL design techniques,
including a low-jitter SSPLL, lowspur SSPLL, fractional-N digital PLL,
and fractional-N digital SSPLL. He
pointed out the fundamental tradeoff between PLL jitter and power.
He also indicated that a potential
improvement of PLL performance
requires an optimization at both the
block and system levels.
Following the final lecture, a happyhour dinner was organized for the
speakers and attendees by the SSCS
Tsinghua Student Chapter.
-Yang Liu, Chao Zhang,
and Milin Zhang

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