EE105 – Fall 2015

Microelectronic Devices and Circuits

Prof. Ming C. Wu
wu@eecs.berkeley.edu
511 Sutardja Dai Hall (SDH)

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Invention of Transistors - 1947

Bardeen, Shockley, and Brattain Point contact Ge bipolar

at Bell Labs - Brattain and transistor
Bardeen invented the bipolar
transistor in 1947.

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 The First Integrated Circuits - 1958

R. N. Noyce Jack Kilby

Fairchild Semiconductor Texas Instruments
Co-Founder of both Invented IC during his first year at TI
Fairchild and Intel
(deceased 1990) (Nobel Prize 2000)

“Unitary Circuit” made of Si “Solid Circuit” made of Ge

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Moore’s Law
Memory chip density Microprocessor complexity
versus time versus time

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Moore’s Paper in 1965

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Moore’s Law in 1965

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 Moore’s Argument

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Intel Core i7 Microprocessor

(4 Cores)
~ 1.1 Billion Transistors

Most powerful processor has about 10B transistors today.

Most powerful FPGA has 20B+ transistors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
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 7nm Transistors by IBM

Working research prototype chip with 7nm transistors

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/technology/ibm-announces-computer-chips-more-
powerful-than-any-in-existence.html

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FinFET
•  Invented at Berkeley !
•  Hisamoto, D.; Wen-Chin
Lee; Kedzierski, J.;
Takeuchi, H.; Asano, K.;
Kuo, C.; Anderson, Erik;
Tsu-Jae King; Bokor, J.;
Chenming Hu,
"FinFET-a self-aligned
double-gate MOSFET
scalable to 20 nm,"
IEEE Transactions on
Electron Devices, 2000

http://www.nytimes.com/
imagepages/2011/05/05/science/
05chip_graphic.html?
action=click&contentCollection=Sci
ence&module=RelatedCoverage&r
egion=Marginalia&pgtype=article

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 Digital vs Analog
•  Analog electrical signals
take on continuous values

•  Digital signals appear at

discrete levels. Usually we
use binary signals which
utilize only two levels.
•  One level is referred to as
logical 1 and logical 0 is
assigned to the other level.

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Why Analog?

•  The “real” world is analog

–  Analog is required to interface to just about anything
–  Even to get two digital chips to talk to each other:

TX RX

1-12 (Elad Alon)

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 Another Example: RF Transceiver

Source: Mehta et al, “An 802.11g WLAN

SoC”, JSSC Dec. 2005

•  Analog needs to
provide gain +
filtering with low
noise and distortion
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Sensing

•  Similar to communications – analog needed for signal

conditioning

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 Creative Touch Sensors

http://www.ivanpoupyrev.com/projects/touche.php
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Internet of Things (IoT)

sensory
swarm infrastructural internet of things
core

mobile access

Adapted from
Rabaey, ASPDAC, 2008
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 Sensors in a Phone
Lots of sensors:
•  9DoF motion sensing,
–  3 axis accelerometer
–  3 axis gyroscope
–  3 axis compass
•  3 microphones,
•  2 image sensors,
•  ambient light and proximity
sensors,
•  archetypal touch screen
sensor.

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Inside iPhone4

Gyroscope

Accelerometer

www.memsjournal.com/2010/12/motion-sensing-in-the-iphone-4-mems-accelerometer.html
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 Accelerometer in iPhone4

•  Made by STMicroelectronics
•  ASIC stacked on MEMS
•  Wafer level packaging (WLP) for
MEMS
•  2 polysilicon layer surface
micromachining process
(pioneered at Berkeley Sensor
and Actuator Center, BSAC)
•  EE 147, Intro to MEMS, covers a
lot more on this

www.memsjournal.com/2010/12/motion-sensing-in-the-iphone-4-mems-accelerometer.html
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Accelerometer in iPhone4

www.memsjournal.com/2010/12/motion-sensing-in-the-iphone-4-mems-accelerometer.html
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 Differential Capacitive Accelerometer

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Differential Capacitive Sensing

x0 x0
C1 = C C2 = C
x 0 + δx x 0 − δx

For small displacement:

⎛ x0 x0 ⎞
C1 − C 2 = C ⎜⎜ − ⎟⎟
⎝ x0 + δx x0 − δx ⎠
− 2 x δx 2
= C 2 0 2 ≈ −C δx
x 0 − δx x0
C1 + C2 ≈ 2C

C1 δx
V0 = −VS + ⋅ 2VS V0 ≈ − VS
C1 + C 2 x0
C1 − C 2 Output voltage is linearly
= VS
C1 + C 2 proportional to the displacement

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 ADXL Block Diagram – Open Loop

Vamp Vdemod VOUT

time

•  Minimum detectable capacitance change: 20 aF (aF = 10-18F)

•  Minimum detectable displacement: 0.02 nm (1/5 of hydrogen atom)
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What You Learned in EE40

•  Resistors, capacitors, •  Ideal OP Amp

inductors
•  Time/frequency domain
•  KCL, KVL analysis
•  Bode Plot

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 What You Will Learn in EE 105

Op Amp Circuit

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EECS 105 in the Grand Scheme

•  Example: Cell Phone

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 Circuit Simulation

•  SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit

Emphasis)
–  Developed at UC Berkeley!
–  Outgrowth of CANCER (Computer Analysis of Nonlinear
Circuits, Excluding Radiation)

•  We will use HSPICE in class (Read the Tutorial

online)
•  Many other versions of SPICE
–  LTSPICE free download from Linear Technology
http://www.linear.com/designtools/software/#LTspice
–  However, GSIs will only focus on HSPICE, and answer
questions related to HSPICE

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