Analog VLSI

The subject of analog VLSI relates to integrated circuits which primarily use MOS transistors operating in the subthreshold region as building blocks for systems. These systems are usually signal processors and often are based on biological systems. Analog VLSI systems take advantage of the size and scale of current digital CMOS fabrication technology, relying on circuit redundancy and statistical properties to overcome the ubiquitous analog circuit pitfalls of nonlinear distortion, noise injection, and component mismatch.

Research in analog VLSI covers many areas of interest. Device modeling is necessary to provide a better understanding of transistor behavior in subthreshold. Circuit design often relies on existing analog designs, and by taking advantage of subthreshold transistor properties, efficient new designs have been made. Work in this lab particularly concentrates on current-mode subthreshold MOS circuits. System design utilizes new and old analog circuits to create large-scale systems. Some system designs in this lab include analog VLSI models of auditory processing, early vision models and silicon retinas, associative memory, adaptive neural networks, and speech recognizers.

Some analog VLSI research at other institutions

• The Physics of Computation Group at Caltech
• Cristof Koch's lab at Caltech
• Eric Vittoz's Lab at EPFL, Switzerland
• Zurich Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich, Switzerland (Rodney Douglas, Misha Mahowald, Paul Verschure, and others)
• Collective Computation and Sensorimotor Systems Laboratory at Georgia Institute of Technology (Steve DeWeerth)
• Analog Computation Group at University of Florida (John Harris)
• VLSI Systems Laboratory at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (Ralph Etienne-Cummings)
• The Silicon Audition Project at Berkeley (John Lazzaro and John Wawrzynek)
• Systems Engineering and Design Automation Laboratory at the University of Sydney (Marwan Jabri)

Other useful sites for Analog VLSI researchers

• The MOSIS Home Page: Fabrication schedules and Run status updates.
• The MOSIS eMAIL system explained in detail.
• Source code for the so-called Chipmunk Tools (``analog'' and so forth) maintained by John Lazzaro.

The Johns Hopkins University World-Wide Web Server

A number of WWW services are available from the Johns Hopkins University. Some which are relevant to this Website are summarized below:

• The Johns Hopkins University Home Page
• The Johns Hopkins University Gopher services
• The Johns Hopkins Aerial View Map
• The Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering
• The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
• The Department of Biomedical Engineering
• The Department of Computer Science

Some Electrical Engineering Sources on the World Wide Web

Please notify the page maintainer if any of these links is no longer available, or if you have suggestions for other links to add to this list.

• The EE Circuits Archive (UW)
• Lycos Search Engine EE Circuits page
• University Programs
• Organizations and Gov't Labs
• Corporations