Ahmad Bahai

Where Analog Meets Digital: Analog?to?Information Conversion and Beyond

Energy efficiency, long battery life, and low latency are key attributes of many emerging ultralow-power sensing and monitoring systems. Applications such as always-on reactive sensors for natural human-device interfaces, as well as multiple consumer and industrial applications for the Internet of Things (IoT), require ultralow-power designs beyond the promise of state-of-the art data converters. These devices demand a new approach to analog-digital system partitioning with the goal of significant overall reduction in energy consumption. Unlike most multimedia systems, many IoT applications require signal information extraction or signature extraction, rather than full reconstruction of the original sensed waveforms. Under these conditions, Nyquist rate sampling may no longer offer the optimal digitization scheme. Recent work on alternative sensor digitization strategies targets drastic sampling rate reductions in analog-to-digital conversion, while preserving the valuable relevant information (knowledge) present in the sensed signal. This article aims to give an overview of the emerging field of analog-to-information conversion in light of various sub-Nyquist sampling techniques recently appearing in literature,as well as to highlight some of the opportunities, challenges, and new applications such converters offer.

Ultra-low energy systems: Analog to information

Ultra-low power systems and circuits are increasingly pivotal for many fast growing segments of semiconductor industry. A confluence of multiple technologies has brought the promising opportunity for pervasive connectivity of people and things closer than ever. Innovative system partitioning, advances in analog and digital circuit design, modern embedded sensing technologies and intelligent power management are critical to achieve the ambitious ultra-low power targets of the modern sensor nodes. In this review, we address some of the challenges and opportunities of ultra-low power system and circuit design.

Ultra-low Energy systems: Analog to information

Ultra-low power systems and circuits are increasingly pivotal for many fast growing segments of semiconductor industry. A confluence of multiple technologies has brought the promising opportunity for pervasive connectivity of people and things closer than ever. Innovative system partitioning, advances in analog and digital circuit design, modern embedded sensing technologies and intelligent power management are critical to achieve the ambitious ultra-low power targets of the modern sensor nodes. In this review, we address some of the challenges and opportunities of ultra-low power system and circuit design.

Keynote address: Opening keynote

The complete presentation was not made available for publication as part of the conference proceedings. Provides a brief professional biography of the presenter.

1.2 Dynamics of exponentials in circuits and systems

Our industry is in a state of transition as the result of the confluence of two trends - the first, technology driven, the second, market driven: 1. CMOS scaling is coming to an end! This is encouraging “multi-dimensional innovations” in circuits and systems enabled by various scaling trends (exponential and nonlinear) in CMOS device engineering for analog circuits, new materials such as III–V, timing references, high-performance SiGe devices, integrated sensors, and Si photonics. 2. Electronics is a critical element in many product areas: automotive, industrial, and medical. In all of these, there is rapid growth in both volume and sophistication. Demand for these products will result in an industry where a very large number of semiconductor devices is provided to a large number of customers using differentiated manufacturing technologies.