Director’s Message

The Texas Analog Center of Excellence (TxACE) is leading analog research and education. Over the past year, TxACE researchers published 25 journals, 68 conference papers, and made four invited presentations. We also filed five patent applications and two invention disclosures. 36 PhD and 8 MS students have completed their degree programs.

Last year, the Center funded 91 research tasks led by 76 principal investigators at 28 institutions, including three international universities in Korea, Taiwan, and Canada. The Center supported 238 graduate and undergraduate students.

The Center is making steady progress toward developing technologies that will enable prediction of time to failure and more importantly, continuing to make 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 voltage reference achieving a temperature coefficient of 176ppm/°C, reduced current variation of 2.75%/°C while consuming 4.6nW; (2) a PLL using a ring oscillator with a wide frequency range of 7 to 14 GHz, achieving an integrated jitter of 70 fs RMS; (3) a 24V-to-1V DC-DC converter with an on-line remaining useful life estimator for capacitors that allowes an efficiency improvement of 35% from the baseline design; (4) use of nonlinear and non-ordered control strategies in a SIMO DC-DC converter to achieve a load transient of 2A/ns and the peak efficiency of 96.1%; (5) a data-driven analog circuit synthesizer with automatic topology selection and sizing that can generate OpAmp designs within minutes while achieving quality approaching that of experienced designers, and (6) an active discharge system for safety that reduces the DC link capacitor discharge time in electric vehicles during emergency from over 10 seconds to one second by employing the main inverter switches, which also removes separate discharge components for lowers cost.

It was gratifying to see many of our current and former PIs at the NSTC AI Driven RFIC Design proposer’s day workshop. I look forward to seeing our on-going work on AI- assisted circuit design and PI’s contributing toward this national research initiative.

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, PIs and staff for their efforts. 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
Texas Instruments Distinguished University Chair Professor
The University of Texas at Dallas