Bulk-Driven Circuit Techniques for CMOS FDSOI Processes: From Circuit Concept to Implementations

In the contemporary technology landscape dominated by digital-centric systems and applications, the significance of analog front-end signal processing remains indispensable. The precision and performance of critical analog, mixed-signal or mm-wave components such as low-noise amplifiers, equalizers, and data converters are fundamentally determined by technological parameters, such as transconductance, DC gain, device matching, linearity, and timing accuracy, among others.

Enhancing these parameters through intrinsic design improvements presents a significant challenge and becomes infeasible beyond certain limits with state-of-the-art circuit design techniques. As the performance of CMOS transistors is fundamentally constrained, foreground or background calibration schemes are commonly employed to mitigate the limitations of MOS devices. However, these constraints can be effectively addressed through the implementation of active and passive bulk-driven circuits enabled by silicon-on-insulator (SOI) CMOS technologies. Fully-Depleted Silicon-on-Insulator (FD-SOI) CMOS technologies offer superior transistor characteristics compared to standard bulk CMOS technology, providing enhanced electrical performance, improved power efficiency, and better scalability.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of FD-SOI CMOS technology, presenting key innovations in design methodologies and circuit implementations adopting bulk-biasing techniques across analog, digital, mixed-signal, and mmWave circuits and systems. It addresses critical transistor limitations, including finite transistor gain, offset, mismatch, noise and linearity, among others.

The authors provide detailed technical insights, mathematical modelling, design approaches and circuit realizations covering circuit advances using both static and dynamic transistor body-biasing techniques. Emphasis is placed on overcoming state-of-the-art circuit limitations such as finite DC gain, bandwidth, matching/accuracy and power efficiency. These performance metrics are rigorously investigated through mathematical modelling, validated through simulation and experimentally demonstrated using both dynamic and static body-biasing architectures.

Friedel Gerfers (Senior Member, IEEE) received the Dr.-Ing. degree from the University of Freiburg, Germany, in 2005. He has gained his first industrial R&D experience at Philips Semiconductor, Starnberg, Germany. In 2006, he joined Intel Research, Santa Clara, USA, as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, working on new types of piezoelectric MEMS sensors and their readout circuits. His entrepreneurial spirit led him from 2007 to 2011 to the start-up companies Aquantia and Alvand Technologies, USA. In the role of a technical director, he led the mixed-signal departments, which were crucial for the successful market positioning of these companies in the field of high-speed data transmission systems that operate close to the Shannon limit.

In 2009, he founded the technology startup, NiederRhein Technologies, Mountain View, USA. More recently, he was responsible for the worldwide development of high-precision data-converters for Integrated Device Technology (IDT), San José, USA. The team was later in 2014 acquired by Apple Inc., Cupertino, CA, USA.

Since 2015, he has been a full professor at the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany, where he is currently the director and head of the "Mixed Signal Circuit Design (MSC)" chair. In 2018, he co-founded IC4X GmbH, Berlin, which specializes in the development of high-performance analog and mixed-signal circuits and systems.

In recognition of these achievements in his field, he was awarded in 2019 the Einstein-Professorship for Mixed Signal Circuit Design from the Einstein Foundation. He is currently a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Leibniz Institutes - Innovations for High Performance Microelectronics (IHP) and the Ferdinand Braun Institute (FBH), and of the Research Fab Microelectronics Germany (FMD).

He is co-author of the book “Continuous-Time Sigma-Delta A/D Conversion, Fundamentals, Error Correction and Robust Implementations”. In addition, Dr. Gerfers has authored or co-authored several other book chapters and holds more than 18 patents.

His current research interests include energy-efficient mixed-signal integrated circuit design, self-correcting and reconfigurable analog circuits, and high-speed and high-performance data converters for wireless, wireline and optical communications systems. Dr. Gerfers is currently a member of the Technical Program Committee of the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), the IEEE European Solid-State Devices and Circuits Conference (ESSERC), the European Microwave Week (EUMW), and the Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC). He was a guest editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC) in 2021.