Alex Huber - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Alex Huber

IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, 2009

This paper presents a quarter-rate clock and data recovery (CDR) circuit for plesiochronous seria... more This paper presents a quarter-rate clock and data recovery (CDR) circuit for plesiochronous serial I/O-links. The 2times-oversampling phase-tracking CDR, implemented in 90 nm bulk CMOS technology, covers the whole range of data rates from 5.75 to 44 Gb/s realized in a single IC by the novel feature of a data rate selection logic. Input data are sampled with eight parallel

ESSCIRC 2014 - 40th European Solid State Circuits Conference (ESSCIRC), 2014

This paper presents a capacitive sensor interface IC for vortex flow measurements. With this inte... more This paper presents a capacitive sensor interface IC for vortex flow measurements. With this interface, we can measure flows down to half the minumum flow speed of the state of the art, for media temperatures up to 400 • C and pressures up to 200 bar in pipes from 15 mm up to 300 mm diameter, even in the presence of mechanical vibrations, for media ranging from air over oil to mercury. The mechanical sensor used is very robust in the presence of steam hammers. The sensor IC was realized in 0.35 μm CMOS and operates over a temperature range of −50. .. 125 • C. It adds input-referred noise far below the kT/C noise of the sensor, 1.17 aF/ √ Hz at fs = 128 kHz. The IC consumes 1.5 mA from a 3.3 V supply and has an area of 10 mm 2. The main signal processing problems to solve were the compensation of timevarying offsets up to 8 pF while measuring 60 aF, and the digital detection of signal frequencies at 1.15 dB SNR, done by adaptive filtering. The sensor IC has a production yield of 96.5 %.

2009 Proceedings of ESSCIRC, 2009

1st Ultra-Wideband Expert Talk (UET'05), …

- In this paper, we analyze the achievable location accuracy of a high-precision localization sys... more - In this paper, we analyze the achievable location accuracy of a high-precision localization system using time-difference-of-arrival measurements of ultra wide-band (UWB) pulses. This system is under development at our institute and based on a low-power CMOS chip. ...

Conference Proceedings. 1997 International Conference on Indium Phosphide and Related Materials

A complete noise characterization as a function of emitter-geometry, temperature, bias-point and ... more A complete noise characterization as a function of emitter-geometry, temperature, bias-point and frequency (2-26 GHz) of InP/InGaAs HBTs was carried out. Measurements and simulations have shown that there is an optimum emitter geometry and bias point for achieving a minimum noise measure. The noise measure is very important figure of merit in broadband amplifier design because not only the noise

Conference Proceedings. Eleventh International Conference on Indium Phosphide and Related Materials (IPRM'99) (Cat. No.99CH36362)

ABSTRACT

Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing

This paper extends the driving-point signal-flow graphs to switched-capacitor (SC) circuits by in... more This paper extends the driving-point signal-flow graphs to switched-capacitor (SC) circuits by introducing a new theoretical element: an auxiliary voltage source that transfers no charge. In contrast to existing SFG methods, our method has no restrictions as to what types of SC circuits can be analysed, it requires no equivalent circuits or tables, and it works with two-phase as well as multi-phase SC circuits of any complexity. Compared to charge-equation matrix methods, it requires more effort, but is better suited for hand analysis because it makes causal relationships visible. Three illustrative examples are given to show the efficiency of the method and present a few application hints: a voltage doubler, the standard SC integrator, and a four-phase circuit simulating an inductor.

Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing, 2016

The methods for switched-capacitor (SC) noise analysis published up to this date fall in two grou... more The methods for switched-capacitor (SC) noise analysis published up to this date fall in two groups: one group contains methods suitable for analysis by hand that are not easily applicable to all S...

We describe an advanced InP/InGaAs based technology for the monolithic integration of pin-photodi... more We describe an advanced InP/InGaAs based technology for the monolithic integration of pin-photodiodes and SHBT-transistors. Both devices are processed using the same epitaxial grown layer structure. Employing this technology, we have designed and fabricated two photoreceivers achieving transimpedance gains of / and optical/electrical bandwidths of /. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest bandwidth of any HBT-based photoreceiver OEIC published to date. We even predict a bandwidth of for the same circuit topology by a simple reduction of the photodiode diameter and an adjustment of the feedback resistor value.

2005 IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband, 2005

A newly available commercial ultra-wideband 3D location and tracking system has been characterize... more A newly available commercial ultra-wideband 3D location and tracking system has been characterized in terms of measurement accuracy and disturbance of the line-of-sight path between the located tag and the receiving sensors. While the standard deviation of a large number of position readings is 15 cm or better, bias on the order of meters often occurs that we address to

2005 IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband, 2005

Abstract-In this paper, we analyze the achievable location accuracy of a wireless localization sy... more Abstract-In this paper, we analyze the achievable location accuracy of a wireless localization system using pulse arrival time measurements of ultra-wideband (UWB) pulses. We briefly review the limits on the ranging accuracy given the regulatory constraints of UWB emissions and ...

2006 IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference - Digest of Technical Papers, 2006

A divide-by-4 circuit operates for input frequencies from 31 to 41 GHz at signal amplitudes &... more A divide-by-4 circuit operates for input frequencies from 31 to 41 GHz at signal amplitudes "0.5Vpp. The circuit consists of a dynamic followed by a static frequency divider. The dynamic and static frequency dividers consume 2mA and 1mA, respectively, from a 1.1V supply

2006 Proceedings of the 32nd European Solid-State Circuits Conference, 2006

ABSTRACT A sampling latch for full-, half and quarter-rate clock and data recovery circuits at da... more ABSTRACT A sampling latch for full-, half and quarter-rate clock and data recovery circuits at data rates of 12.5 Gb/s, 20 Gb/s and 25 Gb/s, respectively, achieving a bit error rate lower than 10-12 is presented. The circuit is implemented in a 90-nm CMOS technology. The master-slave D-FF including peaking inductors consumes only 1 mW of power and requires a snail area of 30times20 mum2

IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine, 2014

Measuring a Small Number of Samples and the 3v Fallacy any solid-state circuits papers today repo... more Measuring a Small Number of Samples and the 3v Fallacy any solid-state circuits papers today report the mean n and the standard deviation v of measurement results obtained from a small number of test chips and then compare them with numbers other authors obtained. Almost none of them discuss confidence intervals, ranges of values for that standard deviation within which the true value lies with a certain probability. Many implicitly assume that the 3 ! n v range would contain all but 0.27% of chip samples to be expected in volume production. This is incorrect even if it is certain that the measured quantity is exactly normal distributed. In this tutorial article, we shed some light on confidence and error intervals and show how the naive approach to interpreting 3 ! n v can lead to a misjudgment of error probabilities by orders of magnitude. We show that using standard deviations only works for normal distributions, and then we propose a better, distribution-independent way to report measurements in the future. Along the way we show how many ICs you actually need to measure to obtain a range that contains, with a probability as small as 75%, all but 0.27% of the ICs coming from the same batch as the measured ICs. This number is 1,027.

IEEE Microwave Magazine, 2014

M any solid-state circuits papers today report the mean n and the standard deviation v of measure... more M any solid-state circuits papers today report the mean n and the standard deviation v of measurement results obtained from a small number of test chips and then compare them with numbers other authors obtained. Almost none of them discuss confidence intervals, ranges of values for that standard deviation within which the true value lies with a certain probability. Many implicitly assume that the 3 ! n v range would contain all but 0.27% of chip samples to be expected in volume production. This is incorrect even if it is certain that the measured quantity is exactly normal distributed. In this article, we shed some light on confidence and error intervals and show how the naive approach to interpreting 3 ! n v can lead to a misjudgement of error probabilities by orders of magnitude. We show that using standard deviations only works for normal distributions , and then we propose a better, distributionindependent way to report measurements in the future. Along the way we show how many integrated circuits (ICs) you actually need to measure to obtain a range that contains, with a probability as small as 75%, with all but 0.27% of the ICs coming from the same batch as the measured ICs. This number is 1,027.

Indium Phosphide and Related Materials Conference, 1999

In this paper the design and a complete characterization of an InP/InGaAs single heterojunction b... more In this paper the design and a complete characterization of an InP/InGaAs single heterojunction bipolar (SHBT) mm-wave amplifier is described. The circuit is designed for the 60 GHz band allocated for wireless LAN and mobile communications. The amplifier achieves a gain of 20 dB from 50 GHz to 70 GHz. Beside S-parameter noise and gain compression measurements are presented. No

IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband, 2005

A newly available commercial ultra-wideband 3D location and tracking system has been characterize... more A newly available commercial ultra-wideband 3D location and tracking system has been characterized in terms of measurement accuracy and disturbance of the line-of-sight path between the located tag and the receiving sensors. While the standard deviation of a large number of position readings is 15 cm or better, bias on the order of meters often occurs that we address to

IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, 2009

This paper presents a quarter-rate clock and data recovery (CDR) circuit for plesiochronous seria... more This paper presents a quarter-rate clock and data recovery (CDR) circuit for plesiochronous serial I/O-links. The 2times-oversampling phase-tracking CDR, implemented in 90 nm bulk CMOS technology, covers the whole range of data rates from 5.75 to 44 Gb/s realized in a single IC by the novel feature of a data rate selection logic. Input data are sampled with eight parallel

ESSCIRC 2014 - 40th European Solid State Circuits Conference (ESSCIRC), 2014

This paper presents a capacitive sensor interface IC for vortex flow measurements. With this inte... more This paper presents a capacitive sensor interface IC for vortex flow measurements. With this interface, we can measure flows down to half the minumum flow speed of the state of the art, for media temperatures up to 400 • C and pressures up to 200 bar in pipes from 15 mm up to 300 mm diameter, even in the presence of mechanical vibrations, for media ranging from air over oil to mercury. The mechanical sensor used is very robust in the presence of steam hammers. The sensor IC was realized in 0.35 μm CMOS and operates over a temperature range of −50. .. 125 • C. It adds input-referred noise far below the kT/C noise of the sensor, 1.17 aF/ √ Hz at fs = 128 kHz. The IC consumes 1.5 mA from a 3.3 V supply and has an area of 10 mm 2. The main signal processing problems to solve were the compensation of timevarying offsets up to 8 pF while measuring 60 aF, and the digital detection of signal frequencies at 1.15 dB SNR, done by adaptive filtering. The sensor IC has a production yield of 96.5 %.

2009 Proceedings of ESSCIRC, 2009

1st Ultra-Wideband Expert Talk (UET'05), …

- In this paper, we analyze the achievable location accuracy of a high-precision localization sys... more - In this paper, we analyze the achievable location accuracy of a high-precision localization system using time-difference-of-arrival measurements of ultra wide-band (UWB) pulses. This system is under development at our institute and based on a low-power CMOS chip. ...

Conference Proceedings. 1997 International Conference on Indium Phosphide and Related Materials

A complete noise characterization as a function of emitter-geometry, temperature, bias-point and ... more A complete noise characterization as a function of emitter-geometry, temperature, bias-point and frequency (2-26 GHz) of InP/InGaAs HBTs was carried out. Measurements and simulations have shown that there is an optimum emitter geometry and bias point for achieving a minimum noise measure. The noise measure is very important figure of merit in broadband amplifier design because not only the noise

Conference Proceedings. Eleventh International Conference on Indium Phosphide and Related Materials (IPRM'99) (Cat. No.99CH36362)

ABSTRACT

Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing

This paper extends the driving-point signal-flow graphs to switched-capacitor (SC) circuits by in... more This paper extends the driving-point signal-flow graphs to switched-capacitor (SC) circuits by introducing a new theoretical element: an auxiliary voltage source that transfers no charge. In contrast to existing SFG methods, our method has no restrictions as to what types of SC circuits can be analysed, it requires no equivalent circuits or tables, and it works with two-phase as well as multi-phase SC circuits of any complexity. Compared to charge-equation matrix methods, it requires more effort, but is better suited for hand analysis because it makes causal relationships visible. Three illustrative examples are given to show the efficiency of the method and present a few application hints: a voltage doubler, the standard SC integrator, and a four-phase circuit simulating an inductor.

Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing, 2016

The methods for switched-capacitor (SC) noise analysis published up to this date fall in two grou... more The methods for switched-capacitor (SC) noise analysis published up to this date fall in two groups: one group contains methods suitable for analysis by hand that are not easily applicable to all S...

We describe an advanced InP/InGaAs based technology for the monolithic integration of pin-photodi... more We describe an advanced InP/InGaAs based technology for the monolithic integration of pin-photodiodes and SHBT-transistors. Both devices are processed using the same epitaxial grown layer structure. Employing this technology, we have designed and fabricated two photoreceivers achieving transimpedance gains of / and optical/electrical bandwidths of /. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest bandwidth of any HBT-based photoreceiver OEIC published to date. We even predict a bandwidth of for the same circuit topology by a simple reduction of the photodiode diameter and an adjustment of the feedback resistor value.

2005 IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband, 2005

A newly available commercial ultra-wideband 3D location and tracking system has been characterize... more A newly available commercial ultra-wideband 3D location and tracking system has been characterized in terms of measurement accuracy and disturbance of the line-of-sight path between the located tag and the receiving sensors. While the standard deviation of a large number of position readings is 15 cm or better, bias on the order of meters often occurs that we address to

2005 IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband, 2005

Abstract-In this paper, we analyze the achievable location accuracy of a wireless localization sy... more Abstract-In this paper, we analyze the achievable location accuracy of a wireless localization system using pulse arrival time measurements of ultra-wideband (UWB) pulses. We briefly review the limits on the ranging accuracy given the regulatory constraints of UWB emissions and ...

2006 IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference - Digest of Technical Papers, 2006

A divide-by-4 circuit operates for input frequencies from 31 to 41 GHz at signal amplitudes &... more A divide-by-4 circuit operates for input frequencies from 31 to 41 GHz at signal amplitudes "0.5Vpp. The circuit consists of a dynamic followed by a static frequency divider. The dynamic and static frequency dividers consume 2mA and 1mA, respectively, from a 1.1V supply

2006 Proceedings of the 32nd European Solid-State Circuits Conference, 2006

ABSTRACT A sampling latch for full-, half and quarter-rate clock and data recovery circuits at da... more ABSTRACT A sampling latch for full-, half and quarter-rate clock and data recovery circuits at data rates of 12.5 Gb/s, 20 Gb/s and 25 Gb/s, respectively, achieving a bit error rate lower than 10-12 is presented. The circuit is implemented in a 90-nm CMOS technology. The master-slave D-FF including peaking inductors consumes only 1 mW of power and requires a snail area of 30times20 mum2

IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine, 2014

Measuring a Small Number of Samples and the 3v Fallacy any solid-state circuits papers today repo... more Measuring a Small Number of Samples and the 3v Fallacy any solid-state circuits papers today report the mean n and the standard deviation v of measurement results obtained from a small number of test chips and then compare them with numbers other authors obtained. Almost none of them discuss confidence intervals, ranges of values for that standard deviation within which the true value lies with a certain probability. Many implicitly assume that the 3 ! n v range would contain all but 0.27% of chip samples to be expected in volume production. This is incorrect even if it is certain that the measured quantity is exactly normal distributed. In this tutorial article, we shed some light on confidence and error intervals and show how the naive approach to interpreting 3 ! n v can lead to a misjudgment of error probabilities by orders of magnitude. We show that using standard deviations only works for normal distributions, and then we propose a better, distribution-independent way to report measurements in the future. Along the way we show how many ICs you actually need to measure to obtain a range that contains, with a probability as small as 75%, all but 0.27% of the ICs coming from the same batch as the measured ICs. This number is 1,027.

IEEE Microwave Magazine, 2014

M any solid-state circuits papers today report the mean n and the standard deviation v of measure... more M any solid-state circuits papers today report the mean n and the standard deviation v of measurement results obtained from a small number of test chips and then compare them with numbers other authors obtained. Almost none of them discuss confidence intervals, ranges of values for that standard deviation within which the true value lies with a certain probability. Many implicitly assume that the 3 ! n v range would contain all but 0.27% of chip samples to be expected in volume production. This is incorrect even if it is certain that the measured quantity is exactly normal distributed. In this article, we shed some light on confidence and error intervals and show how the naive approach to interpreting 3 ! n v can lead to a misjudgement of error probabilities by orders of magnitude. We show that using standard deviations only works for normal distributions , and then we propose a better, distributionindependent way to report measurements in the future. Along the way we show how many integrated circuits (ICs) you actually need to measure to obtain a range that contains, with a probability as small as 75%, with all but 0.27% of the ICs coming from the same batch as the measured ICs. This number is 1,027.

Indium Phosphide and Related Materials Conference, 1999

In this paper the design and a complete characterization of an InP/InGaAs single heterojunction b... more In this paper the design and a complete characterization of an InP/InGaAs single heterojunction bipolar (SHBT) mm-wave amplifier is described. The circuit is designed for the 60 GHz band allocated for wireless LAN and mobile communications. The amplifier achieves a gain of 20 dB from 50 GHz to 70 GHz. Beside S-parameter noise and gain compression measurements are presented. No

IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband, 2005

A newly available commercial ultra-wideband 3D location and tracking system has been characterize... more A newly available commercial ultra-wideband 3D location and tracking system has been characterized in terms of measurement accuracy and disturbance of the line-of-sight path between the located tag and the receiving sensors. While the standard deviation of a large number of position readings is 15 cm or better, bias on the order of meters often occurs that we address to