Prof. Dr. Jose Silva-Martinez of Texas A&M University

The growing demand for high speed and high precision Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) dictates stringent design specifications for the amplifiers which are the basic building block for numerous architectures. The pipeline ADCs are commonly used for high-resolution broadband ADCs. This architecture is based on switched-capacitor techniques, then transient response of the amplifier is of primary concern. The most demanding specifications for the amplifier are: i) high slew-rate needed to charge/discharge the capacitors within a fraction of the time allocated for residue evaluation, ii) high transconductance gain required for fast linear settling iii) large DC gain for accurate final
settling and iv) low power consumption. Therefore, the design of efficient operational transconductance amplifiers that satisfy these constraints is not straightforward. Among several options, the continuous-time modulator is the preferred one for high resolution applications in the range of 1-200MHz. Recent studies show that over 50% of the sigma-delta modulator’s power consumption is expended in the loop filter, which usually employs an active RC solution. The design aspects of high gain broadband amplifiers that can satisfy these stringent requirements are the focus of this seminar. The first part is focus on the design of amplifiers intended for high-performance pipeline ADCs. The amplifiers are optimized for non-linear and linear settling; relevant techniques to achieve these goals will be covered. The second part of the tutorial is devoted to the study of operational amplifier techniques for modulators. The properties and design techniques for resistive loaded multi-stage amplifiers are revisited; frequency stabilization techniques based on feedforward techniques are explained in detail.

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Biography:

Dr. Silva-Martinez received the Ph.D. degree from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, in 1992. In 1993, he joined the Electronics Department, INAOE, where he was the Head of the Electronics Department from 1995 to 1998. He was a Co-founder of the Ph.D. program on electronics in 1993. He is currently with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (ECE) at Texas A&M University (TAMU), College Station, TX, USA, where he holds the position of Texas Instruments Professor. He has co-authored over 135 and 185 journal and conference papers, respectively, 3 books, 14 book chapters, and holds 6 granted patents and 6 more filed. His current research interests include the design and fabrication of integrated circuits for wireless communications, radar, power management, energy harvesting and biomedical applications. Dr. Silva-Martinez is the technical Co-Chair for ISCAS-2022, member of the IEEE Fellows committee (2018-2020), and he was a member of the CASS Board of Governors (2017-2019), a member of the CASS DL Program (2013-2014), and a Senior Editorial Board Member of the IEEE JETCAS (2014-2015). He was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE TCAS-II (2014-2015) and has served as the IEEE CASS Vice President Region-9 from 1997 to 1998, an Associate Editor for the IEEE TCAS-I and TCAS-II several times, and currently serves on the Board of Editors for the other three major journals. He was a recipient of the 2005 Outstanding Professor Award from the ECE, TAMU, and the MWSCAS 2011 and RFIC 2003 Best Student Paper Awards, co-advised in testing techniques the Ph.D. student who was the Winner of the 2005 Best Doctoral Thesis Award, presented by the IEEE Test Technology Technical Council (IEEE Computer Society). He was the co-recipient of the 1990 IEEE ESSCIRC Best Paper Award.