IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Winter 2016 - 28

TABLE 1. MuLTIPrOJECT WAFEr STuDENT DESIGNS COMPLETED BY NOrTEL,
1980-1999. THIS INCLuDES: 5- n m NMOS, 1.2- n m CMOS, 1.5- n m CMOS,
3- n m CMOS, 5- n m CMOS, 25-GHz BIPOLAr (NT25), 0.8- n m BICMOS
(BATMOS), AND 0.8- n m GaAs.
FISCAL YEAr

CMOS DESIGNS*

NMOS DESIGNS

TOTAL NT DESIGNS

2000-2001

1999-2000

1998-1999

1997-1998

1996-1997

1995-1996

175

1994-1995

176

1993-1994

191

1992-1993

228

1991-1992

206

1990-1991

251

1989-1990

283

1988-1989

278

1987-1988

277

1986-1987

282

1985-1986

259

274

1984-1985

184

233

1983-1984

142

1982-1983

Total

3,134

181

3,315

researchers. Access was restricted to
production-qualified technologies, and
the multiproject chips fabricated over
the years facilitated numerous research firsts and graduate degrees.
Many of these students started their
professional careers in BNR/Nortel
after graduation, while others found
their way into academic or industry
careers elsewhere around the globe,
and all continue to be members of the
Nortel University alumni.
Carleton faculty and students took
great advantage of the CMC-sponsored fabrication access and, due to
Carleton's close proximity to the BNR/
Nortel labs in Ottawa, also had direct
access to the newest technologies
available internally. For example, Nortel was one of the first to introduce
BiCMOS [11] with then-leading 0.8- n m
geometries, in the early 1990s. Prof.

W I N T E R 2 0 16

Copeland and other faculty and students were in an enviable position
to take advantage of the change and
challenges of a new technology. The
integration of bipolar and CMOS technology created new problems to solve
and also many opportunities to exploit new device combinations and
performance with novel integrated
designs for precision analog interface
and control circuits. Fundamental
work was undertaken creating new,
on-chip, high-speed interconnect
structures. This work was extended to
create models for on-chip inductors
used in wireless designs [7]. Other
work centered on the creation of precision voltage-controlled oscillators
[8], and innovative analog-to-digital
convertors. Frequency synthesis was
a well-examined topic, with many
leading research results [9], [10].

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

Figure 5: A 5-GHz SiGe heterojunction
bipolar transistor monolithic radio transceiver with tunable filtering.

These developments garnered
the Dr. Copeland and the Carleton
research community a long and
prestigious list of technical publications and industry notoriety.
In addition, this steady stream of
researchers contributed significantly to the BNR/Nortel war chest
of intellectual property and helped
to build an environment of research
and excellence within Nortel that
was admired by those within the
company and by many other (competitive) university representatives.
These achievements placed Nortel
in a position to integrate wireless and
transmission functions that had not
been possible previously. Once again
technology had progressed, this time
to 0.5- n m silicon-germanium (SiGe)
BiCMOS, with an extremely high performance set of devices to choose
from and novel circuit topologies to
invent. During his tenure as a visiting MSS in 1995, Miles helped lay
the foundation for two very aggressive circuit demonstrators: 1) a single-chip, 5-GHz radio receiver (see
Figure 5) and 2) a single-chip 10-Gb/s,
OC-192 integrated clock and data
recovery circuit (see Figure 6).

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Winter 2016