Deep Learning (DL) has contributed to the success of many applications in recent years. The applications range from simple ones such as recognizing tiny images or simple speech patterns to ones with a high level of complexity such as playing the game...
29 November 2012
This paper reviews the direct connection of sensors to microcontrollers without using any analogue circuit (such as an amplifier or analogue-to-digital converter) in the signal path, thus resulting in a low-cost, lower-power sensor electronic interfa...
To enable the design of large capacity memory structures, novel memory technologies such as non-volatile memory (NVM) and novel fabrication approaches, e.g., 3D stacking and multi-level cell (MLC) design have been explored. The existing modeling tool...
Nonvolatile (NV) memory is a key element for future high-performance and low-power microelectronics. Among the proposed NV memories, spintronics-based ones are particularly attractive for applications, owing to their low-voltage and high-speed operat...
26 November 2023
This paper provides a short review of sustainable hybrid energy harvesting and its applications. The potential usage of self-powered wireless sensor (WSN) systems has recently drawn a lot of attention to sustainable energy harvesting. The objective o...
Power reduction in CMOS platforms is essential for any application technology. This is a direct result of both lateral scaling—smaller features at higher density, and vertical scaling—shallower junctions and thinner layers. For achieving this power r...
The development of Internet of Things (IoT) systems is a rapidly evolving scenario, thanks also to newly available low-power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies that are utilized for environmental monitoring purposes and to prevent potentially dan...
This paper presents an analog-digital hardware-software co-design environment for simulating and programming reconfigurable systems. The tool simulates, designs, as well as enables experimental measurements after compiling to configurable systems in...
Circuit or electronic components are useful elements allowing the realization of different circuit functionalities. The resistor, capacitor and inductor represent the three commonly known basic passive circuit elements owing to their fundamental natu...
Since the CMOS technology scaling has focused on improving digital circuit, the design of conventional analog circuits has become more and more difficult. To overcome this challenge, there have been a lot of efforts to replace conventional analog cir...
16 December 2022
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are considered to be among the most important scientific domains. Yet, the exploitation of WSNs suffers from the severe energy restrictions of their electronic components. For this reason there are numerous scientific...
The quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) nano-technique has attracted computer scientists due to its noticeable features such as low power consumption and small size. Many papers have been published in the literature about the utilization of this tech...
14 November 2014
When designing an analog front-end for neural interfacing, it is hard to evaluate the interplay of priority features that one must upkeep. Given the competing nature of design requirements for such systems a good understanding of these trade-offs is...
The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) driven keyword spotting (KWS) technologies has revolutionized human to machine interaction. Yet, the challenge of end-to-end energy efficiency, memory footprint and system complexity of current neural net...
With the fast progress in miniaturization of sensors and advances in micromachinery systems, a gate has been opened to the researchers to develop extremely small wearable/implantable microsystems for different applications. However, these devices are...
Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) is a low-power, non-von-Neumann, general-purpose paradigm for classical computing using transistor-free logic. Here, classical bits are encoded on the charge configuration of individual computing primitives known a...
4 September 2020
As we approach the end of Moore’s law, many alternative devices are being explored to satisfy the performance requirements of modern integrated circuits. At the same time, the movement of data between processing and memory units in contemporary...
Ultra-low power applications often require several kb of embedded memory and are typically operated at the lowest possible operating voltage (VDD) to minimize both dynamic and static power consumption. Embedded memories can easily dominate the overal...
The Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm is under constant development and is being enabled by the latest research work from both industrial and academic communities. Among the many contributions in such diverse areas as sensor manufacturing, network pr...
This paper develops an ultra-low power asynchronous circuit design methodology, called Multi-Threshold NULL Convention Logic (MTNCL), also known as Sleep Convention Logic (SCL), which combines Multi-Threshold CMOS (MTCMOS) with NULL Convention Logic...
With aggressive scaling of device geometries, density of manufacturing faults is expected to increase. Therefore, yield of complex Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chips (MP-SoCs) will decrease due to higher probability of manufacturing defects especially,...
Notwithstanding the increasing interest in Molecular Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata (MQCA) as emerging devices for computation, a characterization of their behavior from an electronic standpoint is not well-stated. Devices are typically analyzed with...
This article reviews design challenges for low-power CMOS high-speed analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). Basic ADC converter architectures (flash ADCs, interpolating and folding ADCs, subranging and two-step ADCs, pipelined ADCs, successive approxim...
Modern systems-on-chip (SoCs) today contain hundreds of cores, and this number is predicted to reach the thousands by the year 2020. As the number of communicating elements increases, there is a need for an efficient, scalable and reliable communicat...
Ultra-low-voltage operation improves energy efficiency of logic circuits by a factor of 10×, at the expense of speed, which is acceptable for applications with low-to-medium performance requirements such as RFID, biomedical devices and wireless senso...
In this paper, we demonstrate how a network of dendrites can be used to build the state decoding block of a wordspotter similar to a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) classifier structure. We present simulation and experimental data for a single line dendrit...
The carry look-ahead adder (CLA) is well known among the family of high-speed adders. However, a conventional CLA is not faster than other high-speed adders such as a conditional sum adder (CSA), a carry-select adder (CSLA), and the Kogge–Stone...
This paper presents scaling of Floating-Gate (FG) devices, and the resulting implication to large-scale Field Programmable Analog Arrays (FPAA) systems. The properties of FG circuits and systems in one technology (e.g., 350 nm CMOS) are experimentall...
Recent advances in computing allows researchers to propose the automation of hydroponic systems to boost efficiency and reduce manpower demands, hence increasing agricultural produce and profit. A completely automated hydroponic system should be equi...
In this paper, we present a novel operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) topology based on a dual-path body-driven input stage that exploits a body-driven current mirror-active load and targets ultra-low-power (ULP) and ultra-low-voltage (ULV)...
With increasing core-count, the cache demand of modern processors has also increased. However, due to strict area/power budgets and presence of poor data-locality workloads, blindly scaling cache capacity is both infeasible and ineffective. Cache byp...
In this paper, we present a hardware friendly binary decision tree (DT) classifier for gas identification. The DT classifier is based on an axis-parallel decision tree implemented as threshold networks—one layer of threshold logic units (TLUs) follow...
Wireless sensor networks are at the center of scientific interest thanks to their ever-growing range of applications. The main weakness of wireless sensor networks is the restricted lifetime of their sensor nodes due to limited energy capacity. The e...
The ongoing revolution in Deep Learning is redefining the nature of computing that is driven by the increasing amount of pattern classification and cognitive tasks. Specialized digital hardware for deep learning still holds its predominance due to th...
Emerging non-volatile memories based on resistive switching mechanisms attract intense R&D efforts from both academia and industry. Oxide-based Resistive Random Acces Memories (OxRAM) gather noteworthy performances, such as fast write/read speed,...
Artificial intelligence (A.I.) has revolutionised a wide range of human activities, including the accelerated development of autonomous vehicles. Self-navigating delivery robots are recent trends in A.I. applications such as multitarget object detect...
7 September 2022
Rockfalls and landslides are hazards triggered from geomorphological and climatic factors other than human interaction. The economic and social impacts are not negligible, therefore the topic has become an important field in the application of remote...
Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) have been touted for their inherent resistance to invasive attacks and low cost in providing a hardware root of trust for various security applications. SRAM PUFs in particular are popular in industry for key/ID...
Incorrect sensor readings can cause serious problems in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), potentially disrupting the operation of the entire system. As shown in the literature, they can arise from various reasons; therefore, addressing this issue has...
Performance analysis tools allow application developers to identify and characterize the inefficiencies that cause performance degradation in their codes, allowing for application optimizations. Due to the increasing interest in the High Performance...
This work presents a dynamically reconfigurable architecture for Neural Network (NN) accelerators implemented in Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) that can be applied in a variety of application scenarios. Although the concept of Dynamic Partial R...
Smart lighting control systems represent an advanced approach to reducing energy use. These systems leverage advanced technology to provide users with better control over their lighting, allowing them to manually, remotely, and automatically modify t...
This paper presents a systematic approach to extract electrical equivalent circuit model (ECM) parameters of the Li-ion battery (LIB) based on electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). Particularly, the proposed approach is suitable to practical...
The continuous scaling needed for better performance and higher density has introduced some new challenges to the back end of line (BEOL) in terms of layout and design. Reductions in metal line width, spacing, and thickness require major changes in b...
The aim of this paper is to prove that, through a canonic approach, sinusoidal oscillators based on second-generation voltage conveyor (VCII) can be implemented. The investigation demonstrates the feasibility of the design results in a pair of new ca...
17 February 2022
In this paper, we introduce a novel tree-based architecture which allows the implementation of Ultra-Low-Voltage (ULV) amplifiers. The architecture exploits a body-driven input stage to guarantee a rail-to-rail input common mode range and body-diode...
Future Smart and Connected Communities (SCC) will utilize distributed sensors and embedded computing to seamlessly generate meaningful data that can assist individuals, communities, and society with interlocking physical, social, behavioral, economic...
Reducing voltage supply is one of the most effective way to reduce the power consumption, but, on the other hand it is a challenging choice for the analog designers. In this paper, different topologies, well-suited for low voltage and ultra-low volta...
We present our design exploration of reconfigurable Threshold Logic Gates (TLG) implemented using silver–chalcogenide memristive devices combined with CMOS circuits. Results from simulations and physical circuits are shown. A variety of linearly sepa...
In this paper, we propose a fully standard-cell-based common-mode feedback (CMFB) loop with an explicit voltage reference to improve the CMRR of pseudo-differential standard-cell-based amplifiers and to stabilize the dc output voltage. This latter fe...
