In this paper, a review and analysis of different design techniques for (ultra) low-voltage integrated circuits (IC) are performed. This analysis shows that the most suitable design methods for low-voltage analog IC design in a standard CMOS process include techniques using bulk-driven MOS transistors, dynamic threshold MOS transistors and MOS transistors operating in weak or moderate inversion regions. The main advantage of such techniques is that there is no need for any modification of standard CMOS structure or process. Basic circuit building blocks like differential amplifiers or current mirrors designed using these approaches are able to operate with the power supply voltage of 600 mV (or even lower), which is the key feature towards integrated systems for modern portable applications.

A new on-chip oscillation test strategy for analog and mixed-signal circuits is presented. In the proposed method, onchip Schmitt trigger is used as the on-chip frequency reference to compensate the influence of process parameter variations. Furthermore, this solution also brings the possibility to implement Oscillation-based Built-In Self-Test (OBIST) for analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits. The proposed OBIST strategy has been experimentally applied to active analog integrated filters, and its efficiency in detecting hard-detectable catastrophic faults is presented. To demonstrate applicability of the proposed method also in nanoscale technologies, the method has been used to test a noninverting amplifier designed in 90 nm CMOS technology. Consequently, the impact of scaling was analyzed and the method efficiency in covering catastrophic faults achieved for 0.35 μm and 90 nm CMOS technology were compared.

The power saving issue and clean energy harvesting for wireless and cost-affordable electronics (e.g., IoT applications, sensor nodes or medical implants), have recently become attractive research topics. With this in mind, the paper addresses one of the most important parts of the energy conversion system chain – the power management unit. The core of such a unit will be formed by an inductorless, low-voltage DC-DC converter based on the cross-coupled dynamic-threshold charge pump topology. The charge pump utilizes a power-efficient ON/OFF regulation feedback loop, specially designed for strict low-voltage start-up conditions by a driver booster. Taken together, they serve as the masters to control the charge pump output (up to 600 mV), depending on the voltage value produced by a renewable energy source available in the environment. The low-power feature is also ensured by a careful design of the hysteresis-based bulk-driven comparator and fully integrated switched-capacitor voltage divider, omitting the static power consumption. The presented converter can also employ the on-chip RF-based energy harvester for use in a wireless power transfer system.

In this work, a new versatile voltage- and transconductance-mode analog filter is proposed. The filter, without requiring resistors, employs three differential-difference transconductance amplifiers (DDTAs) and two grounded capacitors, which is suitable for integrated circuit implementation. Unlike previous works, the proposed filter topology provides: (1) high-input and low-output impedances for a voltage-mode (VM) analog filter, that is desirable in a cascade method of realizing higher order filters, and (2) high-input and high-output impedances for a transconductance-mode (TM) analog filter without any circuit modification. Moreover, a quadrature oscillator is obtained by simply adding a feedback connection. Both VM and TM filters provide five standard filtering responses such as low-pass, high-pass, band-pass, band-stop and all-pass responses into single topology. The natural frequency and the condition of oscillation can be electronically controlled. The circuit operates with 0.5 V supply voltage. It was designed and simulated in the Cadence program using 0.18 µm CMOS technology from TSMC.