Richard B. Brown - Research
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Micropower Digital SOI
Graduate Student Researcher: Robert Senger

WIMS Microcontroller Fabricated in TSMC 0.18mm CMOS

The goal of this research is to develop a low power microcontroller to control the WIMS systems. Power consumption of analog and digital circuits has moved to the forefront as one of the most significant problems facing mixed-signal system designers. This microcontroller explores novel architectural and circuit techniques to reduce power while maintaining an acceptable level of computational throughput. A baseline architecture has been fabricated in TSMC 0.18mm CMOS and the core has been functionally verified up to 43MHz operation. Notable features of this chip are the low voltage analog front end (AFE) and on-chip CMOS-MEMS clock generator block (CLK) shown above. Future versions of this chip will incorporate advanced power saving techniques to maximize the battery life of the WIMS systems. Eventually, the chip will be migrated into SOI to explore relevant power-saving optimizations. Future implementations of the microcontroller will be compared against the baseline to determine the effectiveness of the power-saving techniques being explored. This proj­ect is funded by the Engineering Research Centers Program of the National Science Foundation under Award Number EEC-9986866.