IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Spring 2016 - 98

SSCS DLs Tour Princeton in December 2015

For the second year in a row, the IEEE
Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS)
planned three multispeaker Distinguished Lecturer (DL) tours to three
SSCS Chapters on the U.S. East Coast.
This included the Lehigh, Princeton,
and Columbia Chapters. The SSCS DL
tour was coordinated by John Corcoran, SSCS Awards chair. The following Chapter chairs were involved:
■ Betty Nelson, SSCS-Lehigh Valley
■ Nagi Naganathan, SSCS chair and
secretary, Princeton/Central Jersey Section
■ Prof. Kaushik Sengupta, SSCS,
Princeton University
■ Prof. Mingoo Seok, SSCS-New York
(Columbia University).
Three SSCS DLs, Prof. Jan Van
der Spiegel, Prof. Francesco Svelto,
and Prof. Borivoje Nikolic´, delivered
exemplary talks at Princeton University on 3 December 2015. The
DLs were hosted by Prof. Kaushik
Sengupta from Princeton University.
The event drew many students and
working professionals and generated interesting discussions.

talk Abstracts
Jan Van der Spiegel
Prof. Jan Van der Spiegel, from the
University of Pennsylvania, presented
"Bio-Inspired Polarization Imagers-
Making the Invisible Visible."

Abstract
Biology provides us with fascinating
examples of intelligent, low-power,
and highly efficient sensory systems.
With the advances in CMOS technology, it has become feasible to build
microelectronic systems that mimic
some of the key features found in biology. This talk will focus on CMOS
vision sensors for polarization imaging. We will review briefly the concepts of polarization and how it is
used by various species in nature to
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2016.2546580
Date of publication: 21 June 2016

s p r i n g 2 0 16

SSCS DLs pose with the hosts of a very successful event.

enhance their vision or to aid with
navigation and communication. Inspired by the biology, we have explored polarization for a variety of
applications to detect features that
are hard to see or even invisible to
the human eye. More recent results
from the literature, including the use
of polarization imaging for disease
detection, will be reviewed. Motivated by the potential advantages of
polarization imaging, we have developed a CMOS imager that combines
the pixel array with micropolarizers
and on-chip processing. Details of
the design and polarizer optimization will be described.

Francesco Svelto
Prof. Francesco Svelto of the Università di Pavia, Italy, gave the talk "On
the Design of Circuits for Frequency
Synthesizers at MM-waves in UltraScaled CMOS."

Abstract
Transceivers for wireless communications at millimeter waves are becoming pervasive in several commercial
fields. Taking advantage of a cut-off
frequency of hundreds of gigahertz,
CMOS technology is rapidly expanding from radio frequency to millimeter
waves, thus enabling low-cost compact

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solutions. The question we raise in this
talk is whether scaling is just providing advantages at millimeter waves
or not. We present experimental data
of single devices, comparing 65-nm
and 32-nm nodes in a wide-frequency
range, in particular, switches used in
voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs)
for tank components tuning, MOM and
AMOS capacitors, and inductors. fT and
fMAX increase though slower than in
the past, ron*Coff, a figure of merit for
switches, improves correspondingly.
As a consequence, wide-band circuits
benefit from scaling to 32 nm. As an
example, a frequency divider-by-four,
based on differential pairs used as
dynamic latches, realized in both technology nodes and able to operate up to
108 GHz, is discussed. On the contrary,
passive components do not improve
and eventually degrade their performances. As a consequence, a conventional LC VCO, relying on tank quality
factor, is not expected to improve. In
this work we discuss a new topology
for VCOs, based on inductor splitting,
showing low noise, and wide tuning
range in ultrascaled nodes.

Borivoje nikolic
Prof. Borivoje Nikolic´ of the University
of California, Berkeley, presented the
lecture "Resilient, Wide-Voltage-Range
RISC-V Processors in 28 nm Technologies."

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