A Level Shifter With Almost Full Immunity to Positive dv/dt for Buck Converters

High-frequency buck converters need a fast transition of switching nodes (high dv/dt). Such high dv/dt, especially the positive one, can cause malfunction of a conventional pulse-triggered active-coupled (PTAC) level shifter that is used to control the high-side NMOS switch. In this work, we first discuss the dv/dt immunity of conventional PTAC...

A Low-Spur Fractional-N PLL Based on a Time-Mode Arithmetic Unit

This article introduces a low-jitter low-spur fractional-N phase-locked loop (PLL) adopting a new concept of a time-mode arithmetic unit (TAU) for phase error extraction. The TAU is a time-signal processor that calculates the weighted sum of input time offsets. It processes two inputs - the period of a digitally controlled oscillator (DCO)...

Interfacial properties of Cu/SiO2 using a multiscale modelling approach in electronic packages

Interfacial properties of Cu/SiO2 in semiconductor devices has continued to be the subject of challenging study for many years because of its difficulties in experimentally quantifying the critical strength of interface. In this paper, a multi-scale modeling approach is built to characterize the interfacial properties between Cu and SiO2. In...

Modeling nonlinear moisture diffusion in inhomogeneous media

While moisture diffusion in microelectronic device and packaging has been studied for decades, the problems involving complex nonlinear moisture diffusion in multi-material assembly have not been fully studied. This paper has developed a general nonlinear diffusion model by adopting water activity, a continuous state variable, as the field...