Project title:
Flip-flop design and analyze against supply variation for energy harvesting system.
Team members:
Hao-Yen Tang, David Burnett
Abstract:
Harvesting energy from ambient energy source becomes a topic of great interest in
these years. With this technique, we could build a energy-autonomous system
without using any batteries using energy source such as in-door lighting, thermoenergy, piezo-electric energy, and so on. However, the electricity harvested from
these energy sources usually needs some DC-DC conversion before using it. It turns
out that if we want to use these energy harvesters as a power source, the voltage
provided would have lots of fluctuation due to the presence of DC-DC converters
and interface circuits. Besides, the power harvested by these sources is usually
small, and the storage capacitance is also small for most of case. It turns out that the
supply voltage would drop significantly while powering other circuit using energy
harvesters.
In this project, we want to analyze the effect of supply variation on digital circuits,
especially flip-flops. We’re going to specially focus on 2 issues:
1. The supply voltage change periodically ( modeling a DC-DC converter’s output)
2. The supply voltage decrease significantly ( modeling the exhausted storage
capacitor)
Also we want to design a flip-flop circuit that is less sensitive to supply variation
with minimized power consumption to make it well-suited for circuits powered by
energy harvesters.
Reference:
[1] Okumura, T.; Hashimoto, M.; , "Setup time, hold time and clock-to-Q delay computation under
dynamic supply noise," Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), 2010 IEEE , vol., no., pp.1-4, 1922 Sept. 2010
[2] Fukazawa, M.; Nagata, M.; , "Measurements of Digital Signal Delay Variation Due to Dynamic Power
Supply Noise," Asian Solid-State Circuits Conference, 2005 , vol., no., pp.165-168, 1-3 Nov. 2005
[3] Kirolos, S.; Massoud, Y.; Ismail, Y.; , "Power-supply-variation-aware timing analysis of synchronous
systems," Circuits and Systems, 2008. ISCAS 2008. IEEE International Symposium on, vol., no., pp.24182421, 18-21 May 2008
[4] Hsien-Hung Wu; Chin-Hsin Fu; Yaw-Feng Wang; Pei-Wen Luo; Yen-Ming Chen; Liang-Chia Cheng;
Cheng-Hsing Chien; , "Characterization of Supply and Substrate Noises in CMOS Digital Circuits," VLSI
Design, Automation and Test, 2007. VLSI-DAT 2007. International Symposium on , vol., no., pp.1-4, 25-27
April 2007
[5] Youngkyu Jang; Changnoh Yoon; Jinsang Kim; Won-Kyung Cho; , "Low-power variation-aware flip
flop," Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), 2012 IEEE International Symposium on , vol., no., pp.488-491, 20-23
May 2012