ATIME 2013/03 - 03/07/2013

System/circuit co-design of high-density on-chip power management: from battery-operated terminals to energy-harvesting wireless sensor nodes.

Eduard Alarcón, UPC BarcelonaTech

COURSE DESCRIPTION
Trends in portable applications such as mobile terminals for next generation communications proceed in the direction of increasing the computational load (voice and data communications) while concurrently reducing size and enhancing operating lifetime. Conversely, the density of energy sources is only expected to slightly increase. In front of this scenario, there exists a demand in improved power management integrated circuits to avoid a powering crisis in future systems-on-chip. The major power consumers are the RF power amplifier (PA), the baseband digital circuitry, display lighting and the analog part, all of them with different voltage and current requirements. Basic power management consists in the efficient power distribution of the required voltage/current levels. To achieve that, different power supply choices have been considered hitherto. Focusing in the step-down voltage regulator, either a linear regulator (LDO), a switched capacitor (SC) converter or an inductive switching power converter (switcher) can be considered as candidate technologies in an IC environment. LDOs and SC converters are suited to on-chip integration, whereas several challenges still preclude the on-chip integration of switchers. Since the latter potentially achieve higher efficiency and power density, their system-level and chip-level integration is considered as the target in this project. The ultimate step consequently consists in the fully monolithic integration of the inductive switching power regulator together with the circuits that constitute its load within either the same substrate or chip package, yielding a complete Powered System on a Chip (PSOC). Despite the notable research efforts in the field of integrated switching power converters, paradigm of energy-efficient processing circuits, further investigations are required to achieve further miniaturization and better efficiency whilst retaining compatibility with an integrated technology, in particular with digital CMOS technology, the standard technology for signal processing and computation and the target for RF IC implementations. In the investigation towards integration of switching power converters, research both on optimized converter topologies, active devices, integrable passive elements and control methods is required. This tutorial will cover efficient energy processing circuits within an integrated circuit environment, which requires an multidisciplinar approach, requiring the concurrence of IC design, power electronics and control theory disciplines. In particular it is pursued to conceive, synthesize, design and implement integrated circuit having as functionality the implementation of high-density high-efficiency on-chip switching power regulator. Topics covered will encompass On-chip power supply design and implementation, efficiency optimization, IC-compatible power inductors and capacitors, power MOSFET switches, efficient switch drivers in standard CMOS technologies, analog current-mode controller IC design, digital PWM controller, limit-cycle phenomena in digitally controlled switchers, on-chip adaptive power management techniques, adaptive power supplies for RF power amplifiers, Envelope Elimination and Restoration (EER) technique, Adaptive voltage and threshold scaling for low-power microprocessor and DSP supply. Finally, the concept of harvesting ambient energy as an alternative power source for supplying integrated circuits aiming more miniaturized and distributed applications has been gaining momentum in the past years. A functional energy harvesting system, both in terms of available power and compatibility with system integration, requires concurrently addressing the energy transducing devices together with power management circuits. This tutorial will address the topic of power management circuits specific for harvesters, particularly emphasizing tight joint characterization, modeling and circuit co-design of the energy transducing devices and the power management frontend integrated circuits.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

The learning objectives of this one-day tutorial are four-fold:

1) (1,5h) The first objective is to understand the fundamentals of switched-mode power supplies for portable applications, which requires to review power management requirements of key IC building blocks in current and future portable applications. The tutorial attendees will learn skills on switching power supply design and implementation, efficiency optimization (synchronous vs non-synchronous buck converter, CCM vs DCM, light-load efficiency improvement by means of pulse frequency modulation). Additionally, trends in fully monolithic integration of switching power converters are expected to be learnt, namely: on-chip reactive components for switchers, power MOSFET switches and efficient switch drivers in standard CMOS technologies

2) (1,5h)The second objective is to acquire skills on control techniques for on-chip power converters and their integrated circuit implementation, understand the tradeoffs of digital versus analog control of switching power converters, and become familiar and knowledgeable in designing IC architectures and block design details of digital PWM controllers (encompassing Design of A-D converter by means of delay line, area and power efficient implementation of digital pulse width modulators, quantization and limit-cycle phenomena in digitally controlled switchers) as well as current-mode circuit techniques for analog controllers (encompassing current-mode control, sliding-mode control and one-cycle control)

3) (1,5h) The third objective is to know the system-level implications and circuit-level design aspects of sophisticated on-chip adaptive power management techniques, both adaptive power supplies for RF power amplifiers (including slow envelope tracking and Fast Envelope Elimination and Restoration (EER) technique for EDGE, IS95 and 3GPP-WCDMA modulations) and Adaptive voltage and threshold scaling for low-power microprocessor and DSP supply

4) (1,5h) The concept of harvesting ambient energy as an alternative power source for supplying integrated circuits aiming more miniaturized and distributed applications has been gaining momentum in the past years. A functional energy harvesting system, both in terms of available power and compatibility with system integration, requires concurrently addressing the energy transducing devices together with power management circuits. This tutorial will address as fourth learning objective the topic of power management circuits specific for harvesters, particularly emphasizing tight joint characterization, modeling and circuit co-design of the energy transducing devices and the power management frontend integrated circuits.

TARGET AUDIENCE AND PREREQUISITE KNOWLEDGE

The focus is on either (a) switching power converter researchers/designers with a focus on monolithic integration or (b) analog IC designers involved or interested in power management function. The prerequisite is to have skills on either main topic (power/IC design) and basic knowledge of the complementary topic.

PROGRAMME AND VENUE

Tyndall National Institute
Mardyke Parade
Cork, Ireland

Wednesday, 03 July 2013

Morning (09:00-12:30): Introduction to power supplies and controllers
Afternoon (13:30-17:00): Adaptive power management and energy harvesting

INSTRUCTOR’S BIO

Eduard Alarcón received the M. Sc. (National award) and Ph.D. degrees (honors) in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Catalunya (UPC BarcelonaTech), Spain, in 1995 and 2000, respectively. Since 1995 he has been with the Department of Electronic Engineering at UPC, where he became Associate Professor in 2000. From August 2003 to January 2004, July-August 2006 and July-August 2010 he was a Visiting Professor at the CoPEC center, University ofColorado at Boulder, US, and during January-June 2011 he was Visiting Professor at the School of ICT/Integrated Devices and Circuits, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden. During the period 2006-2009 he was Associate Dean of International Affairs at the School of Telecommunications Engineering, UPC. He has co-authored more than 250 scientific publications, 4 books, 4 book chapters and 4 patents, and has been involved in different National, European and US (DARPA, NSF) R&D projects within his research interests including the areas of on-chip energy management circuits, energy harvesting and wireless energy transfer, and nanotechnology-enabled wireless communications. He is the PI of the Guardian Angels EU FET flagship project at UPC and through N3CAT center he is part of the graphene flagship. He has given 25 invited or plenary lectures and tutorials in Europe, America and Asia, was appointed by the IEEE CAS society as distinguished lecturer for 2009-2010 and lectures yearly MEAD courses at EPFL. He has participated in Evaluation Boards for research proposals both in Europe (Chist-ERA, Belgium, Ireland, Italy) America (Canada) and Asia (Korea). He is elected member of the IEEE CAS Board of Governors (2010-2013) and member of the IEEE CAS long term strategy committee. He was recipient of the Myril B. Reed Best Paper Award at the 1998 IEEE Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems. He was the invited co-editor of a special issue of the Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing journal devoted to current-mode circuit techniques, a special issue of the International Journal on Circuit Theory and Applications, and invited associate editor for a IEEE TPELS special issue on PwrSOC. He co-organized special sessions related to on-chip power management at IEEE ISCAS03, IEEE ISCAS06 and NOLTA 2012, and lectured tutorials at IEEE ISCAS09, ESSCIRC 2011, IEEE VLSI-DAT 2012 and APCCAS 2012. He was the 2007 Chair of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Technical Committee on Power Circuits. He was the technical program co-chair of the 2007 European Conference on Circuit Theory and Design - ECCTD07 and of LASCAS 2013, Special Sessions co-chair at IEEE ISCAS 2013, tutorial co-chair at ICM 2010, Demo Chair of BodyNets 2012, track co-chair of IEEE ISCAS 2007, IEEE MWSCAS07, IEEE ISCAS 2008, ECCTD’09, IEEE MWSCAS09, IEEE ICECS'2009, ESSCIRC 2010, PwrSOC 2010, IEEE MWSCAS12 and TPC member for IEEE WISES 2009, WISES 2010, IEEE COMPEL 2010, IEEE ICECS 2010, IEEE PRIME 2011, ASQED 2011, ICECS 2011, INFOCOM 2011, MoNaCom 2012, LASCAS 2012, PwrSOC 2012, ASQED 2012, IEEE PRIME 2012, IEEE iThings 2012 and CDIO 2013. He served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems - II: Express briefs (2006-2007) and Associate Editor of the Transactions on Circuits and Systems – I: Regular papers (2006-2012) and currently serves as Associate Editor Elsevier’s Nano Communication Networks journal (2009-), Journal of Low Power Electronics (JOLPE) (2011-) and in the Senior Editorial Board of the IEEE Journal on IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems (2010-).

Previous Invited talks and seminars related to the tutorial

o Invited talk, “Energy harvesting: device, circuit and system co-design and on-chip integration”, University of Freiburg – IMTEK, Germany, March 2013.
o Tutorial at the 2012 Asia Pacific Conference on Circuits and Systems (2012 APCCAS), “Energy harvesting: device, circuit and system co-design and on-chip integration”, Kaoshung, Taiwan, October 2012.
o Invited talk, “Towards nanotechnology-based energy-harvesting-enabled Internet of Things”, Oct 30th 2012, Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology, MIET, Zelenograd, Moscow, Russia
o Invited seminar, “Power management for Energy harvesting in portable medical ASICs“”, Sept 26th 2012, Institute of Microelectronics Seville-CSIC, Seville, Spain
o Tutorial at the 2012 International Symposium on VLSI Design, Automation & Test (2012 VLSI-DAT), Hsinchu, Taiwan, April 2012.
o Invited talk, “On-chip energy processing for harvesting applications”, CEI-UPM, Technical University Madrid, Madrid, 12th January 2012
o Invited plenary talk, ZEROPOWER Workshop on nanoscale materials and engineering for energy-efficient electronics, Cork, Ireland, Oct 26 2011
o Tutorial at ESSCIRC 2011, “Energy harvesting: device, circuit and system co-design and integration”, Helsinki, Finland, 15th September 2011
o Invited seminar, “Data conversion frontends for switch-mode power converter digital control”, 20th Workshop on Advances in Analog Circuit Design, AACD 2011, April 5-7, 2011 Leuven Belgium
o Invited lecture, “Energy-efficient on-chip power management: system, circuit and device perspectives”, IEEE Sweden Electron Devices Chapter, Friday February 4th, KTH, Stockholm, Sweden.
o Plenary lecture, “Quo Vadis on-chip power management”, IEEE ICECS, Athens, Greece, Dec 2010.
o Invited lecture, “Energy-efficient on-chip power management: system, circuit and device perspectives” (IEEE distinguished lecturer program), IEEE CAS Santa Clara Valley Chapter, Cadence Design Systems, Santa Clara, Silicon Valley, CA, USA, 19th October 2009.
o Invited lecture, “Energy-efficient on-chip power management: system, circuit and device perspectives” (IEEE distinguished lecturer program), University of Putra Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia, June 2009.
o Tutorial at IEEE ISCAS09, System/Circuit Co-Design of High-Density On-Chip Power Management Functions for Battery-Operated Terminals, Taipei International Convention Center, Taiwan, 23rd May 2009.
o Invited lecture, “Switching Converter Topologies and Control Methods for Wideband Efficient On-chip Power Management”, LEES Colloquium, MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA, Nov 6th 2008.
o Seminar, “System-Level and IC Implementation Techniques for Power Management in Battery- Powered Portable Electronics,” Dragan Maksimovic and Eduard Alarcón, MEAD course in Power Management, lectured at University of Santa Cruz, CA, USA in March and Ecole Politecnique Federale de Lausanne, EPFL, in September, 2005- to date (yearly)

Registration Options:
Full Day - includes course notes, AM Coffee break, lunch and PM coffee break. €200
AM Only - includes course notes and AM coffee break only. €150
PM Only - includes course notes and PM coffee break only. €150
Full time student - includes course notes, AM coffee break, lunch and PM coffee break. Valid student card required. €100

Contact: Prof. Peter Kennedy, Tyndall National Institute. Tel: + 353 21 4903124, email: