Instructor: Boris Murmann is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford,
CA. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 2003.
Dr. Murmann’s research interests are in the area of mixed-signal integrated circuit design, with special emphasis
on data converters and sensor interfaces. He is a member of the International Solid-State-Circuits Conference
(ISSCC) program committee, an associate editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits and a Distinguished
Lecturer of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society.
Driven by ever-increasing application demands, the energy expended per A/D conversion has been reduced substantially over the last decade. This presentation surveys the most recent trends and investigates energy limits as they apply to A/D converter architectures commonly employed in fine-line CMOS technology (Flash, Pipeline, SAR and Oversampling Converters). Through this analysis, opportunities for further improvements are identified and discussed in detail, specifically emphasizing the impact of technology scaling.