Re-Thinking Analog Integrated Circuits in Digital Terms: A New Design Concept for the IoT Era

A steady trend towards the design of mostly-digital and digital-friendly analog circuits, suitable to integration in mainstream nanoscale CMOS by a highly automated design flow, has been observed in the last years to address the requirements of the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In this context, this tutorial brief presents an overview of concepts and design methodologies that emerged in the last decade, aimed to the implementation of analog circuits like Operational Transconductance Amplifiers, Voltage References and Data Converters by digital circuits. The current design challenges and application scenarios as well as the future perspectives and opportunities in the field of digital-based analog processing are finally discussed.

Automated summary

A steady trend towards designing mostly digital and digital-friendly analog circuits to meet the requirements of emerging IoT applications has been observed in recent years. This tutorial provides an overview of concepts and design methodologies that have emerged in the last decade, addressing current design challenges and application scenarios, as well as future perspectives and opportunities in digital-based analog processing.