AUTOMATED SYNTHESIS METHODOLOGY FOR RELIABLE RF INTEGRATED CIRCUITS
Research project funded by the European Commission (contract Nº 840212)
THE TEAM
FÁBIO PASSOS
Principal Investigator (Project PI)
Fábio Passos (M’18-SM’21) received the Ph.D. degree from the Universidad de Sevilla, Seville, Spain, in 2018. At the same time, he was conducting his work at the Instituto de Microelectrónica de Sevilla (IMSE-CNM), Seville, Spain.
He has worked in several academic and industrial institutions, such as Analog Devices, Dialog Semiconductors, IMEC, Instituto de Telecomunicações and University of Barcelona. He has collaborated in several international research projects as part of the research team or as PI.
He is now a Research Fellow in Instituto de Telecomunicações having received a Postdoctoral Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship. His current research interests include the development of automated design methodologies for RF and mm-Wave circuits. He was a recipient of several Best Paper awards, the EDA Competition Award in SMACD 2016, and the Prestigious Outstanding Dissertation Award from the European Design and Automation Association (EDAA), in 2019.
NUNO HORTA
Local Coordinator
Nuno Horta (S’89–M’97–SM’11) received the Licenciado, MSc, PhD and Habilitation degrees in electrical engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon, Portugal, in 1989, 1992, 1997 and 2014, respectively.
In March 1998, he joined the IST Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. Since 1998, he is, also, with Instituto de Telecomunicações, where he is the head of the Integrated Circuits Group.
He has supervised more than 90 post-graduation works between MSc and PhD theses. He has authored or co-authored more than 150 publications as books, book chapters, international journals papers and conferences papers. His research interests are mainly in analog and mixed-signal IC design, analog IC design automation, soft computing and data science.
THE PROJECT
Developing advanced design methodologies for Analog, RF and Mixed-Signal integrated circuits
Technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and the 5th generation broadband, 5G for short, will bring together millions of devices and sensors enabling advances in health care, education, resource management, transportation, agriculture and many other areas. The Gartner hype cycle for emerging technologies1, states that the IoT platforms (e.g., electronic-health (eHealth) services, agriculture control, etc.) will reach its plateau in the next couple of years. Therefore, this is the time to invest in the development of these technologies. In order to maximize the impact on all technologies, one of the key factors is to identify common patterns in all of them. The devices and sensors supporting previous technologies communicate wirelessly among them, and, in order to do so, they rely on a particular class of electronic circuits: Radio-frequency (RF) circuits. Therefore, RF circuits are of upmost importance for the deployment of all IoT/5G/eHealth technologies. The design of RF circuits in nanometric technologies for IoT/5G/eHealth applications is becoming extraordinarily difficult due to their high complexity and demanding performances. The problem is that current design methodologies used by RF designers are mostly based on iterative manual strategies which are time consuming and not always lead to the best possible designs. Moreover, the circuit sizing and layout are mostly treated as independent stages, which will increase the probability of achieving sub-optimal designs due to the fact that layout parasitics are not considered since an initial design stage. Furthermore, although the effects of time-zero variability (i.e., process variations) are usually considered during the circuit sizing, the time-dependent variability (i.e., circuit reliability) is still not considered in most design methodologies, something that is unbearable in modern nanometer technologies, which are highly affected by circuit aging.