All-Digital Time-Mode Approaches for Mixed Analog-Digital Signal Processing

Dear Colleagues,

The rapid advance of CMOS technology has been geared towards optimizing the performance of digital circuits. As a result, analog circuits not only continue to lose the benefit of specialized and process-controlled components, they must also cope with a rapidly shrinking voltage headroom, deteriorating device mismatch, and worsening linearity while satisfying ever stringent performance specifications. Although the scaling-induced performance degradation of analog circuits can be compensated to a certain degree using digital means, these approaches are not only costly both in terms of silicon area and power consumption, they also negatively impact the performance of compensated analog circuits. Technology scaling, on the other hand, has greatly improved the timing accuracy of digital circuits. As a result, time-mode signal processing where information is represented by the time difference between the occurrence of two digital events rather than the nodal voltages or branch currents of electric networks offer a viable and technology friendly means to combat difficulties encountered in design of mixed analog-digital systems. Time-mode signal processing deals with the addition, subtraction, multiplication, amplification, differentiation, integration, quantization, etc., of time variables. Since information to be processed by time-mode circuits is represented by the time difference between digital signals, these circuits are essentially digital systems capable of performing analog and mixed analog-digital signal processing without using power-greedy and speed-impaired digital signal processors. Time-mode circuits possess a number of intrinsic and attractive characteristics, such as compatibility with technology scaling, programmability, portability, immunity to disturbances and noise, and a short design cycle, to name a few that are not possessed by their analog counterparts. Time-mode approaches have found a broad spectrum of emerging applications in mixed analog-digital systems including vehicle navigation systems, analog-to-digital data converters, finite and infinite impulse response filters, all digital phase-locked loops and frequency synthesizers, and Gbps SerDes, to name a few.

This Special Issue is aimed at presenting the latest research findings in time-mode approaches for mixed analog-digital signal processing. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Voltage-to-time converters,
• Time-to-voltage converters,
• Time-to-digital converters,
• Digital-to-time converters,
• Time-mode arithmetic circuits such as time adders, time differentiators, and time integrators, etc.,
• Time registers,
• Time quantizers,
• Time amplifiers,
• Time-mode delta-sigma modulators
• Time-mode SAR analog-to-digital converters
• Other time-based analog-to-digital converters
• Time-mode all-digital phase-locked loops
• Time-mode frequency synthesizers
• Time-mode FIR and IIR filters
• Time-mode SerDes

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