Digital-based analog processing in nanoscale CMOS ICs for IoT applications

Over the past two decades, it is evident that there have been significant improvements (and it is expected to) in CMOS digital circuits when compared against analog building block performance. Digital circuits have been taking advantage of CMOS technology scaling in terms of speed, power consumption, and cost, while the techniques running behind the analog signal processing are still lagging. There has been an increasing trend in finding alternative IC design strategies to implement analog functions exploiting digital-in-concept design methodologies to decrease this historical gap. This idea of re-thinking analog functions in digital terms has shown that Analog ICs blocks can also avail of the feature-size shrinking and energy efficiency of new technologies. This poster shows the advanced of this field in the above scenario, proposing new digital-based analog blocks and proving their performance through silicon measurements.