research

Analog Circuit Design

Although, digital circuit design emerges on analog counterpart, analog circuit design is an indispensable part of electronic circuits. Especially, biomedical applications, military applications, transceivers etc. dictate the usage of the analog circuit components. For example, Figure 1 given below shows the structure of the Zero-IF receiver. The design of the receiver and transmitter circuits play key role in the structure of telecommunication.

Figure 1 The general structure of Zero-IF receiver.

Moreover, naturally occurring signals are analog. However, a microprocessor can process only digital signals. All of these natural signals transmitted to the digital domain with ADCs (analog to digital converter) must be transferred back to analog domain with DACs (digital to analog converter). The design of DAC and ADC with low power consumption, high precision and high speed is challenging. At the same time, mechanical, electrical and optical sensors are indispensable part of our life. Especially, sensors play a critical role in biomedical applications. The signals coming from sensors must be amplified with amplifier, filtered with analog filters and converted to digital domain with ADCs.

Reconfigurable Electronic Circuit Design

Communication technology stands out as an important part of our lives and has a large share in the prosperity of society and the economy. GSM, GPS, biomedical applications and etc. are the essential part of our daily lives. Many kinds of communication such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Global Positioning Systems and so on require capability of transceivers to these communication standards. Generally, the commercial items must be compatible to the standards listed above. For example, cell phone transceivers must process all GSM, GPS, WCDMA, Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n), WiMAX, Bluetooth, ZigBee and Ultra Wideband (UWB) and so on for more convenience. Such a transceiver named as multi standard transceivers can process all standards with single chip. To design multi-standard transceiver, antennas, filters and such architectures must be reconfigurable.

Digital Circuit Design

The first integrated circuit flip-flop with two transistors is invented by Jack Kilby in 1958 at Texas Instruments. Now, 32Gb flash memory has approximately 8 billion transistors. Day by day, as the size of the transistors become smaller, the speed of the transistor increases. Logic gates, memories, SRAM, DRAM, MRAM microcontrollers, microprocessors are some examples of digital circuit design. The global semiconductor market in May 2017 is $31.9 billion. Integrated circuit plays key role in the commercial items. Figure 2 (a) shows the first transistor (AT & T Archives). Figure 2 (b) shows the first integrated circuit (Texas Instruments) Figure 3 gives the layout of the Intel i7 microprocessor.

Figure 2 (a) First transistor (AT & T Archives) (b) First integrated circuit (Texas Instruments)

Figure 3 The layout of the Intel i7 microprocessor.