SiliconIntervention delivers quantum effect breakthrough in analog circuit design

Advanced analog and mixed signal specialists SiliconIntervention, Kelowna BC, recently provided a successful demonstration of eliminating thermal noise in analog circuits based on quantum tunneling.

Developed together with the University of British Columbia under a Canadian government sponsored MITACS program, the test silicon was fabricated by Global Foundries in a standard 22nm FDSOI CMOS process, facilitated by CMC Microsystems.

“Un-switched capacitor-based signal processing that exhibits no thermal noise is a means to achieve the lowest possible current consumption in high performance signal processing,” said Martin Mallinson, chief scientist and founder at SiliconIntervention. “The use of quantum tunneling found within thin gate oxides in today’s advanced CMOS processes can be used to great advantage in achieving just this.”

A conceptual view of the development of a low power, data compressing ADC for ultrasound systems is shown below. Source: SiliconIntervention

As a result, SiliconIntervention has developed a platform approach to leveraging the advantages inherent in analog processing functions named ‘The New Analog’.

“This platform has at its roots fundamental principles, including quantum tunneling, taking advantage of process scaling, and just as importantly, also leveraging the non-idealities found in advanced CMOS nodes,” commented Allan Cox, CEO of SiliconIntervention. “While tunneling in transistor gate oxides becomes an increasingly difficult problem for the digital designer to accommodate, innovative use in analog circuit design has now been shown to be the basis for a new generation of state of the art low power circuits from amplifiers to data converters and the whole spectrum of analog and mixed signal devices”.