Faculty and students presented the following papers at the 35th International Conference on VLSI Design (VLSID) from 26 February to 2 March.
- A 180° Phase Shift Biasing Technique for Realizing High PSRR in Low Power Temperature Sensors – Dr. Zia Abbas, Arpan Jain, A V Pullela and Ashfakh Ali.
Research work as described by the authors: The paper presents a low-cost method (no extra LDO, Op-amp) to increase the PSRR of the composite pair-based temperature sensor. Composite pair is a commonly used circuit to generate a linear PTAT voltage for a wide temperature range. A 180° phase shift, voltage biasing technique is introduced at the gate of the NMOS transistor to obtain a supply independent bias current in the composite pair. The proposed technique thus achieves a high supply noise rejection. The circuit as a whole does not require additional circuitry, therefore it saves power and area. A 6μW temperature sensor with 1mV/°C slope is designed in TSMC 180nm technology and achieves PSRR of -80dB. Post-layout simulation results show that the temperature sensor achieves inaccuracy of ±0.1°C from -55°C to 125°C, PSRR of -80dB at 105Hz and -70dB at 200kHz at 1V power supply, and the line regulation of 0.016%/V in a supply voltage range of 1V to 2.5V. Monte-Carlo simulation result for the output PSRR shows -80:56dB as the mean-value with a maximum deviation of ±1.5dB.
- Customizable Head-mounted Device for Detection of Eye Disorders using Virtual Reality – Y Pawankumar Gururaj, Sai Anirudh Karre, Raghav Mittal, Dr. Y Raghu Reddy and Dr. Syed Azeemuddin.
Research work as described by the authors: Eye disorders like myopia, hypermetropia, and color blindness affect millions of people around the world. Early detection can help the affected persons take preventive measures against further degradation. However, early detection requires regular testing and visits to trained healthcare professionals to judge the level of disorder. The customization of the test requirements can simplify the method of diagnosis. This paper presents an approach towards developing a virtual reality-based low-cost head-mounted device (HMD). The standalone HMD can detect eye disorders like visual acuity, astigmatism, color vision deficiency, and age-related macular degeneration, limiting the involvement of healthcare professionals. We did a user study to test the accuracy of our prototype against various optical test scenarios. The study revealed that the prototype achieved an overall accuracy of 93%. We further aim to deploy the device in economically vulnerable communities with limited access to healthcare infrastructure.
In December 1985, a group of about eighty–five delegates assembled on the campus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai to attend the First International Workshop on VLSI Design. The sole purpose of that meeting was to sense the level of VLSI activities in India with a focus on engineering education and research. It started with only 193 Proceedings along with 29 presented papers and just one tutorial. Since then, the conference has come a long way and has grown equilaterally with the VLSI community and has seen the likes of multinational Industries and academic contributors, from all around the globe. The numbers speak for themselves and have amplified to ten – fold the initial attendees, proceedings, presented papers and tutorials.
Conference page: https://vlsid.org/