Harmonizing Energy Efficiency and Signal Chain Friendliness in High-Resolution ADCs

Seminar Date(s)
Seminar Location
Booker Conference Room, Jacobs School of Engineering, 9500 Gilman Dr, La Jolla, San Diego, California 92093
Seminar Speaker
Dr. Shaolan Li
headshot of Shaolan Li
Abstract

High-resolution ADCs are essential components in many biomedical and environmental sensing applications. As the demands for wearable, miniature and point-of-care systems keep increasing, the design requirements for high-resolution ADCs also get more stringent, with strong emphasis on energy efficiency, reliability, and low cost. Over the past few years, many design techniques have been developed to excel the figure-of-merit (FoM) of high-resolution ADCs, where the state-of-the-arts has gotten really close to the theoretical limit. Nonetheless, many of these works overlooked an important factor: the signal chain friendliness. While the ADC cores are made to be very efficient, the heavy burdens exerted on the input driver and/or reference buffer are hardly relaxed by those techniques, and sometimes get exacerbated in some architectures. Consequently, the improvement on energy efficiency and cost are limited in the context of the complete signal chain. In this talk, I will introduce some of our works that shed light onto this blind spot. They demonstrate how to harmonize energy efficiency and signal chain burden reduction through a synergistic combination of noise cancellation, embedded buffer design as well as dynamic amplification.

Seminar Speaker Bio
Dr. Shaolan Li is currently an Assistant Professor with Georgia Tech School of ECE. He received his B.Eng. degree with highest honor from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2012, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin in 2018, all in electrical engineering. Dr. Li is the recipient of NSF CAREER Award 2023 and NIH Trailblazer Award 2023. He servers on the TPC of IEEE CICC, as well as an Associate Editor for Electronics Letters, Journal of Semiconductor and a Guest Editor for IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.
Seminar Contact
Professor Drew Hall