Smart IC Design and Sensing Technologies

A special issue of Chips (ISSN 2674-0729).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 August 2023) | Viewed by 7279

Special Issue Editors

Department of Electrical and Computer Enginneering, University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece
Interests: model order reduction; thermal analysis; VLSI design; integrated circuits; electronic design automation; embedded systems; numerical analysis; circuit simulation
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Thessaly, 383 34 Volos, Greece
Interests: parallel computing’ near-data processing; in-memory computing; dataflow architectures; IoT networks; memory hierarchy design; application-specific integrated circuits
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Smart sensing technologies and their inherent data-processing techniques have drawn considerable research and industrial attention in recent years.

Recent developments in nanometer CMOS technologies have shown great potential to deal with the increasing demand of processing power that arises in these sensing technologies, from IoT applications to complicated medical devices. Moreover, circuit implementation, which could be based on a full analog or digital approach or, in most cases, on a mixed-signal approach, possesses a fundamental role in exploiting the full capabilities of sensing technologies. In addition, all circuit design methodologies include the optimization of several performance metrics, such as low power, low cost, small area, and high throughput, which impose critical challenges in the field of sensor design.

This Special Issue aims to highlight advances in the development, modeling, simulation, and implementation of integrated circuits for sensing technologies, from the component level to complete sensing systems.

Dr. George Floros
Dr. Athanasios Tziouvaras
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Chips is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • VLSI design
  • integrated circuits
  • sensing technologies
  • circuit optimization methods
  • modeling and simulation
  • signal processing
  • CAD tools for smart IC design

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Editorial

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3 pages, 210 KiB  
Editorial
Special Issue “Smart IC Design and Sensing Technologies”
by George Floros and Athanasios Tziouvaras
Chips 2022, 1(3), 172-174; https://doi.org/10.3390/chips1030011 - 20 Oct 2022
Viewed by 1303
Abstract
Smart sensing technologies and their inherent data-processing techniques have drawn considerable research and industrial attention in recent years. Recent developments in nanometer CMOS technologies have shown great potential to deal with the increasing demand of processing power that arises in these sensing technologies, [...] Read more.
Smart sensing technologies and their inherent data-processing techniques have drawn considerable research and industrial attention in recent years. Recent developments in nanometer CMOS technologies have shown great potential to deal with the increasing demand of processing power that arises in these sensing technologies, from IoT applications to complicated medical devices. Moreover, circuit implementation, which could be based on a full analog or digital approach or, in most cases, on a mixed-signal approach, possesses a fundamental role in exploiting the full capabilities of sensing technologies. In addition, all circuit design methodologies include the optimization of several performance metrics, such as low power, low cost, small area, and high throughput, which impose critical challenges in the field of sensor design. This Special Issue aims to highlight advances in the development, modeling, simulation, and implementation of integrated circuits for sensing technologies, from the component level to complete sensing systems. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart IC Design and Sensing Technologies)

Research

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16 pages, 2527 KiB  
Article
An Adaptive Downsampling FPGA-Based TDC Implementation for Time Measurement Improvement
by Evangelos Dikopoulos, Michael Birbas and Alexios Birbas
Chips 2022, 1(3), 175-190; https://doi.org/10.3390/chips1030012 - 08 Nov 2022
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2192
Abstract
In this work, we present a compact “adaptive downsampling” method that mitigates the nonlinearity problems associated with FPGA-based TDCs that utilize delay lines. Additionally, this generic method allows for trade-offs between resolution, linearity, and resource utilization. Since nonlinearity is one of the predominant [...] Read more.
In this work, we present a compact “adaptive downsampling” method that mitigates the nonlinearity problems associated with FPGA-based TDCs that utilize delay lines. Additionally, this generic method allows for trade-offs between resolution, linearity, and resource utilization. Since nonlinearity is one of the predominant issues regarding delay lines in FPGA-based TDCs, combined with the fact that delay lines are utilized for a wide range of TDC architectures (not limited to the delay-line TDC), other implementations (e.g., Vernier or wave union TDCs), also in different FPGA devices, can directly benefit from the proposed adaptive method, with no need for either custom routing or complex tuning of the converter. Furthermore, implementation-related challenges regarding clock skew, measurement uncertainty, and the placement of the TDC are discussed and we also propose an experimental setup that utilizes only FPGA resources in order to characterize the converter. Although the TDC in this work was implemented in a Xilinx Virtex-6 device and was characterized under different operational modes, we successfully optimized the converter’s nonlinearity and resource utilization while retaining single-shot precision. The best performing (in terms of linearity) implementation reached DNLrms and INLrms values of 0.30 LSB and 0.45 LSB, respectively, and the single-shot precision (σ) was 9.0 ps. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart IC Design and Sensing Technologies)
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Review

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19 pages, 5267 KiB  
Review
Silicon Radiation Detector Technologies: From Planar to 3D
by Gian-Franco Dalla Betta and Jixing Ye
Chips 2023, 2(2), 83-101; https://doi.org/10.3390/chips2020006 - 13 Apr 2023
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 3071
Abstract
Silicon radiation detectors, a special type of microelectronic sensor which plays a crucial role in many applications, are reviewed in this paper, focusing on fabrication aspects. After addressing the basic concepts and the main requirements, the evolution of detector technologies is discussed, which [...] Read more.
Silicon radiation detectors, a special type of microelectronic sensor which plays a crucial role in many applications, are reviewed in this paper, focusing on fabrication aspects. After addressing the basic concepts and the main requirements, the evolution of detector technologies is discussed, which has been mainly driven by the ever-increasing demands for frontier scientific experiments. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart IC Design and Sensing Technologies)
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