Associate Professor Huang Mo published a paper in JSSC

Associate Professor Huang Mo, publishes a 1^st author paper in “IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits” (JSSC) in January 2018. JSSC is the topmost journal in solid-state circuits design. And it is the first time for SCUT to publish a 1^st author paper in JSSC.

This paper is titled: ”An Analog-Assisted Tri-Loop Digital Low-Dropout Regulator”, written by Professor Huang Mo from School of Electronics and Information (Microelectronics), SCUT, together with Assistant Professor Lu Yan, Professor Seng-pan U and Professor Rui. Martins from University of Macau.

A Digital Low Dropout Regulator (LDO) based on analog-assisted technique was firstly proposed in this paper. As shown in the figure below, this technique allows digital LDOs to provide large momentary current once the load changes, which greatly reduce the output voltage droop without output decoupling capacitor. Thus this technique well balances the power consumption and transient speed.

Digital LDO is the key technique for high-efficiency system-on-chip (SoC), and also a hot research interest for both industry and academia. To explore higher power efficiencies, multiple voltage domains and fine-grained supply voltage management have been developed, which allows each voltage domain to be optimized independently. This requires multiple LDOs with high speed, low power consumption and low cost LDO. However, due to the power-speed trade-off and large output decoupling capacitor, the conventional digital LDO fails to be widely used in SoC. The proposed analog-assisted technique in this paper addresses the above issues and significantly improves the SoC power efficiency. It can be widely used in Internet of Things (IoT), CPU, biomedicine and so on.

JSSC is the world's topmost journal in solid-state circuits design. Ever since its first issue in 1966, only a few research teams in China has successfully published papers here. Professor Huang Mo joined the School of Electronics and Information (Microelectronics) of SCUT in October, 2016. In the last three years, he has published more than 20 papers in international journals and conferences, including 1 in JSSC and 2 in ISSCC (Known as Chip Olympics).