IEEE Distinguished Lecture – The Different Faces of Variability

“The Different Faces of Variability” by Marcel J.M. Pelgrom, PhD, Delft University of Technology and University of Twente, The Netherlands.

Date:  October 12, 2010 (Tuesday)
Time:  7:30pm – 9:00pm; 6:30pm networking
Venue:  PSDC, Room 2305, 1 Jalan Sultan Azlan Shah, 11900 Bayan Lepas, Penang

Admission is free

Refreshments will be served before the lecture.  Network and interact with like-minded engineers and researchers before the seminar begins.

Abstract

Circuit design greatly depends on the ability to control and reproduce transistor and process parameters. Variation in processing was in the past countered by defining process corners: boundaries in parameter variation that accounted for process tolerances. With the improved control over processing, this batch-to-batch variation is largely under control.

However, now a new class of phenomena has appeared: statistical variations. In conventional ICs, analog circuits with a differential operation (e.g. analog-to-digital converters) were already affected by this random parameter spread. The variation between otherwise identical components is generally described by “mis-match” parameters.  Next to these static random phenomena also time-dependent variations play an increasingly important role: variations in supply voltage and temperature and interference (supply and substrate noise, cross-talk, etc.) are of major importance to optimize circuit performance.  Understanding and mitigating these effects requires more and more statistical means.

This talk will review some of the statistical effects and discuss the various techniques that analog designers in the past used to mitigate statistical issues. Lessons from the analog domain can provide a starting point for the application in the digital domain.

Speaker

Marcel Pelgrom received his B.EE, M.Sc and PhD from Twente University, Enschede The Netherlands. In 1979 he joined Philips Research Laboratories, where his research has covered topics as Charge Coupled Devices, MOS matching properties, analog-to-digital conversion, digital image correlation, and various analog building block techniques. He has headed several project teams and was a team leader for high-speed analog-to-digital conversion. From 1996 till 2003 he was a department head for mixed-signal electronics.

Next to various activities concerning industry-academic relations, he is involved as a research fellow in research on the edge of design and technology.  In 2003 he spent a sabbatical in Stanford University where he was appointed a consulting professor. Since 2007 he is a member of the technical staff of NXP Semiconductors.

Dr Pelgrom is an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, has written over 40 publications, five book chapters and holds 30 US patents. He is lecturing at Twente and Delft Universities, and for MEAD Inc. In August 2010 Springer published the lecture notes as a book: “Analog-to-digital conversion”