Research Programme

Currently there are 3 main research areas in MCCI each with a strong Digitally-Assisted-Analogue emphasis. These three areas are Power Management, Radio Frequency System-On-Chip and System-On-Chip Building Blocks. Each has a 5 year structured research roadmap which was created by industry.

The Power Management area focuses on novel power supply design for use in multi-rail SoCs emphasising efficiency increases with BOM cost reduction. It includes new charge pump and regulator architectures, adapting the power supply to current environment, advanced digital control loops for multi-rail switching converters and high frequency switching converters for Power-Supply-on-Chip.

The Radio Frequency SoC area focuses on mmWave radio SoC and cost reduced flexible and highly digitized multi-mode transceivers. MCCI mmWave radio research covers topics such as 60GHz Wireless HD, E-band and radiometers above 30GHz in deep-sub-micron CMOS. Multi-mode radio addresses challenges in multi-standard RF Front-ends, synthesizers, LNA and PA on CMOS.

The SoC Building Blocks area focuses on calibration and self-test of data-converters including associated very low jitter clocking. We are carrying out research on ADCs with an emphasis on improved FOM for existing converters as well as pushing the data throughput envelope for converters aimed at very wide bandwidth applications. MCCI very low jitter clocking research looks at LCVCO PLL and All-Digital PLLs for use with RF and high speed data-converters.

The research programme is overseen by the Technical Steering Group. The current Technical Steering Group are Mark Barry (MCCI Director), Prof. Peter Kennedy (MCCI Acedemic Sponsor), Prof. Mike Flynn (University of Michigan), Prof. Andrea Baschirotto (University of Salento), Prof. Michiel Steyaert (K.U. Leuven), Mike Keaveney (Analog Devices) and Patrick Quinn (Xilinx)