This chapter treats two important steps in electronic sensor design. The first is the passage from functional blocks to lumped model electronic circuits. In this approach noise will be no more associated with functional blocks, but with circuit topology and electronic device elements. The second step is to analyze the effects of the readout mode on noise, emphasizing the differences between continuous and discrete-time approaches. Finally, we discuss some tradeoffs related to bandwidth and resolution in acquisition chains.

This chapter provides the essential concepts of compressive sensing (CS), also called compressed sensing, compressive sampling, or sparse sampling. A basic knowledge of signal processing is assumed. The treatment is rigorous but limited: more details can be found on the recommended textbooks given at the end of the chapter.

This chapter collects a series of problems and solutions spanning all the sections of this book.

The noise performance and the main characteristics of electronics devices and elementary building blocks have been discussed in earlier chapters. Here, more complex techniques for sensing interfaces are presented. Architectures tailored for specific cases such as resistive and capacitive sensing are analyzed. Furthermore, modulation, feedback, and time-to-digital techniques for signal detection are shown.

The purpose of this chapter is to set up the framework on which the book will be shaped up and it is intentionally based on informal descriptions of concepts. This is obviously a nonrigorous approach but is a fundamental step toward an abstraction process about artificial sensing: what are the ideas behind the general definition of sensors, their main performance limiting processes and essential tradeoffs. Using this inductive approach, we will first define concepts, leaving the formalization to the next chapters of the book. However, if the reader is facing this field for the first time, the argumentation could appear vague and fuzzy; therefore this first chapter should be read again after the rest of the book as the last one.

This chapter starts by first describing techniques to reduce errors. As far as the random ones are concerned, reduction approaches oriented to increase the signal-to-noise ratio on the spectrum domain and their strict relationship with sample averaging are discussed. Following, strategies for limitation of systematic errors are presented, especially based on the feedback concept. However, since the error reduction techniques allow several degrees of freedom, this chapter discusses the tradeoffs in optimizing sensing systems from the resolution, bandwidth, and power consumption point of view. More specifically, the resolution optimization of the sensing process is treated under the information theory point of view and the approach is extended to acquisition chains to understand the role of single building blocks.

Ionic–electronic transduction is at the base of biosensing. We start by addressing some basic principles emphasizing the common background between the electronic and ionic behavior on the base of some classical statistical mechanics concepts. Then, we focus on more specific examples of application in this framework. Of course, the covered examples are only a very small part of the subject and are intended as proof of application to consider the transduction process in the electronic design of biosensor interfaces.

Chapter 2 provides an in-depth and intuitive description of TCI, starting with its basic structure and fundamental operating principle. It explains how the transceiver and inductive coupling coils are designed, their electrical characteristics, and design variations. This is followed by an intuitive explanation of how to do design trade-offs to optimize for different performance requirements, with particular emphasis on design options for optimal power and area efficiency respectively. Integration options – 2/2.5/2.9/3D – are also presented to illustrate implementation flexibility. Two power delivery solutions are then introduced, one using wireless and the other advanced doping technologies. Next, three application examples are described, providing insight into how TCI can be adopted and adapted and quantifying performance improvement against conventional wideband DRAM, stacked flash memory, and network-on-chip solutions. Specific challenges in each of the application areas are elaborated and how TCI can be adapted to address these challenges is explained. The chapter concludes with two postscripts. The first introduces a sample of TCI research carried out in other institutions in parallel to our effort. The second provides an overview of collective synchronization, which is utilized to create a low-cost clock distribution solution for TCI.

Chapter 1 starts by tracing the history of the computer, integrated circuit (IC), and connector in the last 60 years. In particular, it describes how the goal of IC development evolved from high-performance IC to low-power IC and interface, and then to high energy efficiency. This provides the background to help the reader understand current and future challenges faced by the IC and connector in addressing the diverging performance needs of various emerging applications. This in turn sets the stage for the introduction of 3D IC integration, which is evolving from low-cost wirebond to high-performance and high-density TSV-based solutions to offer More than Moore performance improvement. The challenges faced by 3D integration are then enumerated, and 2.5D integration and wireless interface technologies are presented as current and future solutions respectively. A brief overview of wireless technologies is then provided, followed by an explanation of why near-field coupling has been applied to develop two wireless interface technologies – ThruChip Interface (TCI) and Transmission Line Coupler (TLC). The chapter concludes with an overview of TCI and TLC and an elaboration of how they address respectively the challenges in 3D IC integration and connector performance scaling.

Chapter 3 provides an in-depth introduction to TLC, starting with an intuitive explanation of its operating principle, followed by a description of its electrical characteristics and coupler and transceiver designs. It then drills down into design variations for four application areas. The first is the implementation of a multidrop bus, where three TLC derivatives for a master–slave, multidrop bus, single-ended-to-differential conversion, and a multimaster, multidrop bus respectively are presented. The second is smartphone application, where two small-footprint TLC derivatives including one for extended communication distance across the thickness of the smartphone are described, together with a high-EMC immunity transceiver for robust operation in the high-EMI environment of a smartphone. The third is adaptation for automotive LAN, where a TLC derivative compatible with the twisted pair wiring used by automotive LANs is introduced, together with a high-EMC immunity transceiver developed to meet the stringent EMI and EMS requirements demanded of automotive electronics. The fourth is the implementation of a completely wireless interface for SSD application. The system architecture is presented, together with a TLC interface nested within a wireless power interface. System-level challenges in startup and error correction and their solutions are also explained.