ASIC_Spectrometer - david-macmahon/wiki_convert_test GitHub Wiki

People

Robert Abiad, Luis Esteban Hernández, Robert Jarnot, Eric Korpela, Ryan Monroe, Borivoje Nikolic, Rick Raffanti, Brian Richards, Rachel Hochman, Paul Stek, Mark Wagner

Overview

We propose to develop a low power high resolution digital spectrometer ASIC with on-chip ADC. The ASIC will provide a compact, low power, and radiation tolerant digital polyphase filterbank for analyzing microwave thermal emission following the first downconversion in a microwave spectrometer. The mixed signal ASIC based spectrometer will have significant improvements in terms of mass, power, volume, and sensitivity to environmental conditions over other spectrometer technologies such as Chirp-transform, Acousto-optical and digital autocorrelator spectrometers. The largely digital nature of the implementation will reduce calibration requirements and increase stability compared to alternative approaches. The ASIC spectrometer chip will integrate A/D, digital spectroscopy and spectral integration functions. Our novel approach to this ASIC uses an on chip ultra-low power 3 GS/s ADC (for a bandwidth of 1.5 GHz) utilizing capacitive successive approximation and self calibration. The ADC is followed by a 4096 channel digital 4 tap polyphase filter bank to achieve excellent channel to channel isolation. The proposed 2.7 by 2.7 mm ASIC will be fabricated on naturally radiation tolerant 65 nm CMOS process. The mixed signal ASIC will consume 1 watt and delivers a throughput of 300 billion operations per second. The design is based on a digital architecture described in Simulink that has been field-tested on FPGA platforms for radio astronomy applications. The architecture maximizes the utilization of operators to nearly 100%. A test structure has been added to the design to support the detection of soft errors, since space-borne applications expose the circuit to high-energy particles. An in-house automated design flow will be used to map the same Simulink description to the ASIC, preserving cycle-accurate and bit-accurate behavior.

Block Diagram

Testing

radiation test report which includes the ST 65 nm bulk CMOS process