Silicon carbide (SiC) is a wide-bandgap semiconductor with excellent resistance to harsh environments, making it well-suited for high-temperature electronics. Due to its similarities to silicon, silicon carbide processing for CMOS can leverage existing silicon manufacturing methods. However, SiC CMOS production remains in early development and requires robust, conservative circuit design. This thesis presents the design and simulation of an eight-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) targeted for operation up to 500 °C. Simulations without mismatch modeling predict a maximum integral and differential nonlinearity of less than 0.3 LSB, and an effective resolution of 7.89 bits at 200 °C. The ADC is to be fabricated in a 2 µm SiC CMOS process developed by Fraunhofer IISB. If measurement results validate the design, this ADC would represent the highest-resolution monolithically integrated ADC demonstrated above 300 °C. In addition to the ADC design, measurements of SiC CMOS logic gates show low fabrication yield, contrary to previous measurements of Fraunhofer IISB SiC CMOS circuits. Failure analysis attributed this to defects in the metallization layers. ... Read more

This thesis is part of a project where a 120A, 50V (12S Lithium-Polymer battery) electronic speed controller (ESC) with Bidirectional DShot600 support is prototyped. This thesis focuses on the communication and sensing aspects
of the ESC. It discusses the implementation of the DShot communication protocol on an STM32G431KBT6 microcontroller. Also, the microcontroller senses phase currents and phase voltages from a BLDC motor and has to provide all the necessary information and processing resources for a control algorithm to be implemented. A PCB is designed to break out all the required interfaces of the microcontroller. Lastly, temperature management is implemented to prevent overheating of the inverter hardware by means of throttling. The DShot implementation has full bidirectional functionality with 3.4% package corruption. All sensor values are accurately provided to the control algorithm, and temperature and speed information are provided as DShot telemetry. Due to time constraints and lack of integration with the control algorithm, the behavior during anomalies such as power interrupts is not yet thoroughly tested. ... Read more