The objective of this project is to enable a new way of performing analog-to-digital conversion and anti-aliasing filtering in a completely asynchronous fashion, which leads to substantially improved dynamic range, power efficiency and relaxed analog filter requirement. The proposed approach should benefit from the faster device speed and digital computation due to technology scaling but avoid the emerging challenges of analog circuit design in general.
Intellectual merit:
The intellectual merit is a new class of asynchronous analog-to-digital converter topologies that asynchronously sample the analog signal with the proposed non-uniform digital signal processing algorithms to reconstruct and filter the resultant irregular samples. The proposed architectures lead to a new design paradigm shift by performing both voltage and time quantization, and create a new path towards the analog-equivalent digital computation that is significantly more flexible.
Broader impacts:
The broader impact of this research is that it will transform any electronic system involving analog-to-digital conversion from performance demanding to power constrained applications, such as communications and biomedical devices. The multidisciplinary nature of the project provides an excellent platform to cultivate the involved graduate and undergraduate students towards the next generation leaders in science and engineering field. The planned K-12 outreach activities and cross-disciplinary courses will further enhance the broader impacts.
