Power Management circuits are employed in almost all electronic equipment and they have energy storage elements (capacitors and inductors) as building blocks along with other active circuitry. Power management circuits employ feedback to achieve load and line regulation and the feedback loop is designed at an operating point and component values are chosen to meet that design requirements. However the capacitors and inductors are subject to variations due to temperature, aging and load stress. Due to these variations, the feedback loop can cross its robustness margins and can lead to degraded performance and potential instability. Another issue in power management circuits is the measurement of their frequency response for stability assessment. The standard techniques used in production test environment require expensive measurement equipment (Network Analyzer) and time. These two issues of component variations and frequency response measurement can be addressed if the frequency response of the power converter is used as measure of component (capacitor and inductor) variations. In this presentation, techniques to track changes in the dynamic loop characteristics of the DC-DC converters without disturbing the normal mode of operation is presented. A digital pseudo-noise (PN) based stimulus is used to excite the DC-DC system at various circuit nodes to calculate the corresponding closed-loop impulse response. The test signal energy is spread over a wide bandwidth and the signal analysis is achieved by correlating the PN input sequence with the disturbed output generated, thereby accumulating the desired behavior over time. A mixed-signal cross-correlation circuit is used to derive on-chip impulse responses, with smaller memory and lower computational requirement in comparison to a digital correlator approach. Model reference based parametric and non-parametric techniques are discussed to analyze the impulse response results in both time and frequency domain. The proposed techniques can extract open-loop phase margin and closed-loop unity-gain frequency within 5.2% and 4.1% error, respectively, for the load current range of 30-200mA. Converter parameters such as natural frequency (ωn), quality factor (Q), and center frequency (ωc) can be estimated within 3.6%, 4.7%, and 3.8% error respectively, over load inductance of 4.7-10.3µH, and filter capacitance of 200- 400nF. Speaker(s): Dr. Bertan Bakkaloglu, Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/324633

Abstract: Aluminum Nitride (AlN) is a well-established thin film piezoelectric material. AlN bulk acoustic wave (BAW) radio frequency (RF) filters were one of the key innovations that enabled the 3G and 4G smart phone revolution. Recently, the substitutional doping of scandium (Sc) for aluminum (Al) to form aluminum scandium nitride (AlScN) has been studied to significantly enhance the piezoelectric properties and to introduce ferroelectric properties into AlN based material systems. The properties achieved have profound implications for the performance of future 5G and 6G RF filters, piezoelectric sensors, piezoelectric energy harvesters, and for scaling the bit density of ferroelectric nonvolatile memories (NMV). This talk will present on the synthesis of highly Sc alloyed AlScN materials of the thickness (5 nm to 1000 nm), stress, and crystallinity required for applications in NVM and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). The material properties and device performance achieved will be reported and placed in the context of device specific figures-of-merit. Exemplar AlScN based memory, RF, and magnetoelectric sensor devices will be presented and discussed in the context of alternative technologies. Speaker(s): Prof. Troy Olsson, Agenda: 11:45 AM – 12 PM Event check-in 12 – 12:05 PM Announcements 12:05 – 12:50 PM Invited Talk 12:50 – 1 PM Questions & Answers Room: Conference Center (ECC1), Bldg: Building E, 2900 Semiconductor Dr, Texas Instruments, Santa Clara, California, United States, 95051

A blockchain consists of a list of blocks that are linked based on cryptography hash and maintained by distributed network nodes, so that the information recorded in these blocks is non-repudiated. After its first conceptualization by Nakamoto in 2008, blockchain has attracted broad attention and been considered as a promising solution to establish a decentralized architecture with security. In this talk, we will discuss some key characteristics of blockchain and a few promising applications of blockchain that can facilitate security and trust among multiple parties. Some examples include applying blockchain to secure software updates for resource-constrained IoT networks; designing a secure and efficient multi-signature scheme to facilitate multi-party approval process on Fabric, an enterprise blockchain platform; and facilitating fair trading of digital-goods via a blockchain based proxy re-encryption scheme. Speaker(s): Yuhong Liu, Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/328082