IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Spring 2022 - 11

CIRCUIT INTUITIONS
Ali Sheikholeslami
The Art of Controlling Electrons
W
Welcome to the 32nd article in the
" Circuit Intuitions " column series.
As the title suggests, each article
provides insights and intuitions into
circuit design and analysis. These
articles are aimed at undergraduate
students but may serve the interests
of other readers as well. If you read
this article, I would appreciate your
comments and feedback as well as
your requests and suggestions for
future articles in this series. Please
email me your comments: ali@ece.
utoronto.ca.
On 19 February 2022, the IEEE
International Solid-State Circuits Conference,
with support from the IEEE
Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS),
held a one-day virtual event called
Circuit Insights, which was geared
toward third- and fourth-year undergraduate
and starting graduate students.
This event included eight
presentations on the fundamentals of
circuit design; the first one was " What,
Why, and How of Electronic Circuits. "
This article is a written summary of
this presentation. Readers can access
all of the recorded videos associated
with this event on the SSCS YouTube
Channel [1].
We are surrounded by electronics
today; they are in our home appliances,
our cars, and our pockets.
A typical cell phone has billions of
transistors, and these must work
smoothly together to accomplish
their purpose.
These statements tell us the applications
of electronics, but they do
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2022.3164811
Date of current version: 25 June 2022
ros and ones into an image we have
stored in memory before).
These same three categories of
The QR code for a playlist on the SSCS
YouTube channel that includes a video
corresponding to this article and to other
presentations at Circuit Insights.
not define electronics for us. What is
electronics? How do we define it?
Before answering these questions,
let us look deeper inside a cell phone
and recognize its various ICs and their
functions. Figure 1 shows an image of
an iPhone where some ICs are highlighted
in three different categories:
■ memory ICs, such as flash memory,
DRAM, and SRAM
■ ICs that process information, such
as the application processor and
digital baseband processor
■ ICs that communicate information,
such as transceivers that help us
transmit and receive information,
power amplifiers to make sure the
signal can reach the base station,
GPS for navigation, Audio Codec
to turn voice to bits and vice versa,
the touchscreen controller that
translates touch to information, and
the display interface that turns the
information inside the memory into
something we can see (turning zeICs
can be found in almost all other
electronics applications. To see this
in another example, consider the
contactless smart card that is used
today to ride the train or subway
or to purchase items from grocery
stores. A contactless smart card,
which operates without a battery,
includes a nonvolatile memory chip
to store or update our balance every
time we use the card. It also includes
a processing unit to both encrypt
and decrypt our data as well as to
read from the memory or write into
it. Finally, it includes communication
devices. However, unlike
the cell phone, these devices do not
communicate with us; they communicate
with a card reader through a
wireless connection.
As we can see, these two seemingly
different applications (the cell
phone and contactless smart card)
require the same category of devices.
However, each may require devices
that are unique to them. As an example,
for a contactless smart card to
operate without a battery, it needs
electronics to extract power from the
communication signal.
Everything we mentioned so far
is about information, which can
loosely be defined as a bunch of
bits-a bucket of bits, as shown in
Figure 2(a), or a function of time, as
shown in Figure 2(b). The text you
read and figures you see in this magazine
have been translated into bits,
stored in the memory, and processed
and displayed on your screen.
IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE
SPRING 2022
11
IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Spring 2022

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