Mixed-Signal Circuits and Systems

Building on the concepts taught in Transistor Circuits, this course introduces a number of key building blocks of mixed-signal systems. The course starts with examples of mixed-signal systems (e.g. electric vehicle, smartphone, biomedical implant), highlighting the role and importance of these building blocks. It introduces power conversion based on linear- and switched-mode regulators and switched-inductor (buck/boost) converters. The CMOS inverter is extended to CMOS implementation of combinatioral and sequential logic, and analysis of the associated timing and performance limiting factors. Small-signal modeling of the MOSFET is extended to include high-frequency behavior in order to analyse the frequency response of single-stage amplifiers. Analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters are introduced as interfaces between analog and digital circuits, including the basic operating principles of SAR and dual-slope ADCs. Finally, several commonly-used oscillators and filters are introduced.