•  
  •  
 

Gregory Ardault

Publication Date

2003

Document Type

Paper

Abstract

Power consumption and power conversion efficiency have been two key parameters characterizing the performance of electronic circuits since their dawn. With the increasing demand of miniaturization, mobility and portability of electronic industrial and consumer equipment, low-power and high-efficiency circuits are in high demand. Possible energy sources to enable mobility and/or portability are chemical (e.g. batteries, accumulators, micro gas, engine, fuel cells), mechanical (e.g. elastic energy in springs, vibrations, oscillations, ultrasound), thermal (e.g. body heat), EM-Field (e.g. inductive coupling, capacitive coupling, RF) and optical (photovoltaic cells). They are a great number of applications for which lowpower operation can be replaced with remote-powered operation. For optically remote powered operation, we propose the use of optically injected circuits. This has the following advantages: no need for off-chip photovoltaic cells, i.e., reduced package complexity, no need for DC-to- DC converters, i.e., improved conversion efficiency, no need for a power distribution grid, i.e., no Joules losses, and reduced interconnection complexity. This paper studies the concept of optically injected logic circuits and proposes their implementation in deep submicron and beyond CMOS technologies. This paper includes all the calculations and all the processes to fabricate the digital logic circuits. These logic circuits can be used in embedded micro-controllers where very low power operation can be replaced by remote powered operation. No local power source of any kind is necessary. Specific areas of application are data acquisition and control systems in bio-medical implants, space applications, wireless fabrication facilities and wafer-scale robots.

Download

Included in

Engineering Commons

Share

COinS