Director’s Message

The Texas Analog Center of Excellence (TxACE) is leading analog research and education. Over the past year, TxACE researchers published 19 journals, 50 conference papers, 2 books and chapter, and made 17 invited presentations. We also filed 2 patent applications. 26 Ph.D., 10 M.S., and 2 B.S. students have completed their degree programs.

Last year, the Center funded 69 research tasks led by 67 principal investigators at 27 institutions, including three international universities in Korea, Taiwan, and Canada. The Center supported 178 graduate and undergraduate students.

The Center is making steady progress toward developing technologies that will enable predicition of time to failure. It became apparent this year that these technologies are what needed to enable digital twins of everything including design, fabrication, testing and reliability that are critical to semiconductor manufacturing. TxACE is well positioned to work with and help SMART USA Institute operated by SRC, a billion dollar investment that seeks to use digital twins to improve semiconductor manufacturing, achieve its objectives.

The Center is continuing to make constructive impact to the industry and our way of life through its research accomplishments. There are always too many to list all. A partial list includes demonstration of (1) a Cascaded Time-Interleaved noise-shaping (NS) SAR ADC that overcomes the bandwidth limitations of conventional NS SAR architectures that provide excellent efficiency and resolution, (2) a multiphase subharmonic switching wideband 24-GHz TX fabricated in 65-nm CMOS that achieves 20.3% average PAE with −30.8 dB EVM at 3.2-Gb/s, (3) a 2.4-GHz RX fabricated in 65-nm CMOS for 8-PSK double sideband unsuppressed-carrier signals achieving  –74.5-dBm sensitivity at 1 Mbps and 419-µW DC power, (4) delineation of different parts of tissue samples in their natural form, offering tens of microns in resolution and excellent contrast using an array of 200-GHz active split-ring resonators for disease diagnostics and therapeutics discovery automation, and (5) Compute-in-PUF architecture, which unifies analog entropy generation and Hyperdmensional Computing encoding in a single module, eliminating ADC and SRAM overheads.

The TxACE laboratory is continuing to help advance integrated circuit research by making its instruments and expertise available to researchers and industrial partners all over the world. Lastly, I would like to thank the students, PI’s and staff for their efforts, and I look forward to another year of working with the TxACE team to make our way of life better, safer,  healthier and more energy efficient through our research, education and innovation.

Kenneth K. O, Director TxACE
TI Distinguished University Chair Professor
The University of Texas at Dallas