Valentijn De Smedt – författare

This book covers the most recent, advanced methods for designing mixed-signal integrated circuits, for radiation-hardened sensor readouts (capacitive) and frequency synthesizers (quadrature, digitally controlled oscillators and all-digital PLL etc.). The authors discuss the ionizing radiation sources, complex failure mechanisms as well as several mitigation strategies for avoiding such failures. Readers will benefit from an introduction to the essential theory and fundamentals of ionizing radiation and time-based signal processing, with the details of the implementation of several radiation-hardened IC prototypes. The radiation-hardening methods and solutions described are supported by theory and experimental data with, underlying tradeoffs.

This book investigates the possible circuit solutions to overcome the temperature and supply voltage-sensitivity of fully-integrated time references for ultra-low-power communication in wireless sensor networks. The authors provide an elaborate theoretical introduction and literature study to enable full understanding of the design challenges and shortcomings of current oscillator implementations. Furthermore, a closer look to the short-term as well as the long-term frequency stability of integrated oscillators is taken. Next, a design strategy is developed and applied to 5 different oscillator topologies and 1 sensor interface. All 6 implementations are subject to an elaborate study of frequency stability, phase noise and power consumption. In the final chapter all blocks are compared to the state of the art.