This volume of "Analog Circuit Design" concentrates on three topics: RF analogue-to-digital converters; sensor and actuator interfaces; and low-noise oscillators, PLLs and synthesizers. The book comprises six papers on each topic written by international experts. These papers are tutorial in nature and together make a substantial contribution to improving the design of analogue circuits. The book is divided into three parts: Part I, RF analogue-to-digital converters, the application of digital techniques to process analog modulated rf signals in radio receivers requires high linearity and high-resolution analogue-to-digital converters. In portable applications these converters must have an extremely low-power consumption to allow a long standby time. In low-cost signal processing applications these converters are combined with a digital signal processing system onto a single chip. Today digital signal processing systems use advanced CMOS technologies requiring the analogue-to-digital converter to be implemented in the same (digital) technology. Such an implementation requires special circuit techniques.
Part II, sensor and actuator interfaces, interfaces for sensors and actuators shape the gates through which information is acquired from the real world into digital information systems, and vice versa. The interfaces should include analogue signal conditioning, analogue-to-digital conversion, digital bus interfaces and data-acquisition networks. To simplify the use of data-acquisition systems additional features should be incorporated, like self-test, and calibration. To make these goals economically feasible, these functions should be integrated, preferably with the sensor, on a single chip. This part describes the latest techniques in sensor and actuator interface design. Part III, low-noise oscillators, PLLs and synthesizers, the phase noise of the receiver's local oscillator limits the immunity against interfering signals. Therefore it has become the most important specification of the local oscillators of all integrated transceivers. Frequency synthesizers for digital tuning in portable radios require extremely low phase noise for the same reason. This part describes designs and architectures which give rise to very low phase noise.
The text is a reference source for analogue design engineers and researchers wishing to keep abreast of developments in the field. The tutorial nature of the contributions also makes it suitable for use in an advanced course.