Building Blocks of Analog VLSI Systems : Voltage References

What you’ll learn:
Understand and design temperature varying circuits (PTAT/CTAT) from scratch
Understand and design voltage references (which are fundamental blocks in Analog VLSI systems) from scratch
Analyze Process, Supply, Temperature (PVT) and other variations in circuits
Understand different architectures of voltage references used in industry and academia

Requirements:
Fundamentals of Analog Electronic Circuits

Description:
The course is about designing the fundamental block of all the analog systems, which is the voltage reference. Voltage references (Vref ) are ubiquitous building blocks in most electronic circuits and systems. They are used to generate process, supply and temperature (PVT) invariant voltages in various analog modules such as Analog-to-digital (A/D) and digital-to-analog (D/A) converters, voltage regulators,relaxation oscillators, sensor interfaces, DRAMS, flash memories, power-on-reset (PoR) circuits and radio-frequency (RF) communication devices. Due to the development of power-aware applications like the emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT), designing voltage references with low power consumptionwill be of paramount importance since they are typically always-on to ensure robust performance of theaforementioned modules. The IoT nodes also demand other stringent requirements like working at low supply voltages and low area occupancy for the voltage references apart from low power consumption. The state-of-the-art comprises of many such low-power voltage references, each having their own advantages and limitations. A compact understanding and comparison of all the low-power references will lay a good foundation to design or choose a voltage reference for this new and emerging application space.What You’ll Learn from this Course:1) Learn what are PVT/Mismatch variations and how they translate to electrical parameters.2) Define voltage reference w.r.t variations and have a look at a sample specification sheet.3) Design PTAT and CTAT elements of voltage reference and analyze process variations.4) Understand different architectures of voltage references and analyze the effect of PVT in each architecture.5) Understand how to choose an architecture based on spec sheet and consider other trade-offs.

Who this course is for:
Freshers in VLSI industry who want to start designing analog systems from scratch
Job employees who are assigned a project on voltage/current reference and looking for supporting materials
Students who are looking for internships or jobs can design voltage/current references after this course and add them in their resumes to boost their chances of acceptance
Engineers who are looking to transition to analog circuit design and know the basics can start with this course
Any electronics enthusiast who has a passion for learning new circuits can also try this course