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Leading-Edge-Efficiency Data and Power Conversion Integrated Circuit Designs for Emerging Systems

CHAN Chi Hang, ZHU Yan, LU Yan, SIN Sai Weng, Rui Paulo da Silva Martins

University of Macau

Integrated circuits (ICs), or commonly known as Chips, are the foundation of information technology. "Made in China 2025" puts integrated circuits as the first priority for the development of the next-generation information technology in China, reflecting its importance to national level development and security. Such chips not only are the key to enable emerging technologies, such as IoT, 5G mobile communication, Big Data, etc., but also self-sustain industrial support chain and national level security. The high-speed/wide-band analog-to-digital converter (ADC) ICs are the key component for both wireline and wireless communications, millimeter-wave imaging, cognitive radar, and instrumentation systems. Besides, as the development of 5&6G mobile telecommunications, Software-defined-Radio (SDR), up-100G Ethernet, etc., the requirements and challenges for high-speed ADCs become more critical especially on low power point of view. In this project, through various IC innovations, our team has achieved a performance breakthrough on the key hardware technologies, especially emphasizing energy-efficient high-speed data converters and energy-efficient power converters for emerging systems. The results of this project lead to a significant breakthrough. They transfer to 45 publications in leading-edge conferences, journals, or book. In the internationally recognized world-top Conference (ISSCC), also known as Chip Olympics, the number of accepted designs in the data conversion sub-section is the most among the world in 2019 and 2020. In addition, we successfully conducted or are conducting 4 industrial projects which attracted more than 2 million MOP funding. These results not only rise the reputation of Macau nationally and globally in the chip design area but also provide examples and a more robust background for Macao’s R&D technology-transfer.

Fig 1 Application of data converter under different speed and accuracy

Fig 2 9 representative cutting-edge chip designs in this project

Fig 3 The ADC chips published by our team in Chip Olympic conference 2019-2020, and comparison.