Research on radiation-tolerant electronics has increased rapidly over the past few years, resulting in many interesting approaches to modeling radiation effects and designing radiation-hardened integrated circuits and embedded systems. This research is strongly driven by the growing need for radiation-hardened electronics for space applications, high-energy physics experiments such as those on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and many terrestrial nuclear applications including nuclear energy and nuclear safety. With the progressive scaling of integrated circuit technologies and the growing complexity of electronic systems, their susceptibility to ionizing radiation has raised many exciting challenges, which are expected to drive research in the coming decade. In this book we highlight recent breakthroughs in the study of radiation effects in advanced semiconductor devices, as well as in high-performance analog, mixed signal, RF, and digital integrated circuits. We also focus on advances in embedded radiation hardening in both FPGA and microcontroller systems and apply radiation-hardened embedded systems for cryptography and image processing, targeting space applications.

Digitally Assisted Pipeline ADCs: Theory and Implementation explores the opportunity to reduce ADC power dissipation by leveraging digital signal processing capabilities in fine line integrated circuit technology. The described digitally assisted pipelined ADC uses a statistics-based system identification technique as an enabling element to replace precision residue amplifiers with simple open-loop gain stages. The digital compensation of analog circuit distortion eliminates one key factor in the classical noise-speed-linearity constraint loop and thereby enables a significant power reduction. Digitally Assisted Pipeline ADCs: Theory and Implementation describes in detail the implementation and measurement results of a 12-bit, 75-MSample/sec proof-of-concept prototype. The Experimental converter achieves power savings greater than 60% over conventional implementations. Digitally Assisted Pipeline ADCs: Theory and Implementation will be of interest to researchers and professionals interested in advances of state-of-the-art in A/D conversion techniques.

This book gathers, for the first time, an overview of nearly all of the magnetic sensors that exist today. The book is offering the readers a thorough and comprehensive knowledge from basics to state-of-the-art and is therefore suitable for both beginners and experts. From the more common and popular AMR magnetometers and up to the recently developed NV center magnetometers, each chapter is describing a specific type of sensor and providing all the information that is necessary to understand the magnetometer behavior including theoretical background, noise model, materials, electronics, design and fabrication techniques, etc.

This book contains extended and revised versions of the best papers that were presented during the fifteenth edition of the IFIP/IEEE WG10.5 International Conference on Very Large Scale Integration, a global System-on-a-Chip Design & CAD conference. The 15th conference was held at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA (October 15-17, 2007). Previous conferences have taken place in Edinburgh, Trondheim, Vancouver, Munich, Grenoble, Tokyo, Gramado, Lisbon, Montpellier, Darmstadt, Perth and Nice. The purpose of this conference, sponsored by IFIP TC 10 Working Group 10.5 and by the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA), is to provide a forum to exchange ideas and show industrial and academic research results in the field of microelectronics design. The current trend toward increasing chip integration and technology process advancements brings about stimulating new challenges both at the physical and system-design levels, as well in the test of these systems. VLSI-SoC conferences aim to address these exciting new issues.

In the twenty-first century, applications in medicine and engineering must acquire greater safety and flexibility if they are to yield better products at higher efficiency. Experts from academia, industry, and government research laboratories who have pioneered CME ideas and technologies describe its concept and research approach and discuss related hardware and software, science and technology, and medicine and engineering. This book will be invaluable to scientists, researchers, and graduates in the emerging field of CME.

The simplest method of transferring data through the inputs or outputs of a silicon chip is to directly connect each bit of the datapath from one chip to the next chip. Once upon a time this was an acceptable approach. However, one aspect (and perhaps the only aspect) of chip design which has not changed during the career of the authors is Moore’s Law, which has dictated substantial increases in the number of circuits that can be manufactured on a chip. The pin densities of chip packaging technologies have not increased at the same pace as has silicon density, and this has led to a prevalence of High Speed Serdes (HSS) devices as an inherent part of almost any chip design. HSS devices are the dominant form of input/output for many (if not most) high-integration chips, moving serial data between chips at speeds up to 10 Gbps and beyond. Chip designers with a background in digital logic design tend to view HSS devices as simply complex digital input/output cells. This view ignores the complexity associated with serially moving billions of bits of data per second. At these data rates, the assumptions associated with digital signals break down and analog factors demand consideration. The chip designer who oversimplifies the problem does so at his or her own peril.