Research

Dr Umberto Gatti, RedCat Devices, Milan, will be visiting the School of Engineering. As part of his visit he will deliver a seminar entitled, "ICs Design Techniques for Space Applications: from Digital to Mixed-signal". Abstract and biography are given below.

Date & Time: 14:00, Wednesday, 5th October
Venue: Room 526, James Watt South Building

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Abstract

In some environments such as space and avionics altitudes, electronic components must have a certain level of radiation hardness in terms of Total Ionizing Dose and Single Event Effects (depending on the final application). Commercial integrated technologies do not have a sufficient radiation resiliency to guarantee a good reliability for all these environments, leading to the need to find new solutions. In this seminar the basic requirements, issues and solutions related to the design of custom digital ICs for these applications will be firstly discussed, with particular focus on the so-called Radiation-Hardened-By-Design (RHBD) techniques. The development of RHBD digital libraries using standard sub-micrometric CMOS processes (from 180nm down to 130nm) is briefly presented. The libraries include also rad-hard static memory cells which have been used to implement several SRAM memory devices, whose sizes range from 512kbit up to 4Mbit. Similar RHBD techniques have been propagated to mixed-signal ICs, since the main part of the available commercial analog components is made radiation resistant only by using dedicated packages or processes, with penalties on costs and area. A quick overview of issues related to the design and layout of data converters and auxiliary blocks are presented. A final section of the seminar is devoted to the description of the test techniques of the above circuits under radiations (namely Gamma ray and Heavy Ions) and related criticalities.

Biography

Dr. Umberto Gatti received the Laurea degree (summa cum laude) in Electronic Engineering and the Ph.D. in Electronics and Information Engineering from the University of Pavia, Italy, in 1987 and 1992, respectively. From 1993 to 1999, he worked in the Central R&D Lab of Italtel, Italy, and then in the R&D Lab of Siemens, Italy, as Sr. ASIC Engineer. Besides developing analog and mixed analog-digital CMOS/BiCMOS ICs for telecom (data converters, base-band wireless transceivers, burst mode PON interfaces), he was the coordinator of funded projects under the frameworks of FP and Eureka, focused on high-speed Nyquist rate and sigma-delta converters. In 2007 he joined Nokia Siemens Networks, Italy, where he was a Sr. Power Supply Architect for telecom equipment. Currently he is member of the Executive Staff of RedCat Devices, Italy, and also holds research cooperation with the University of Pavia. His present research interests are in the area of CMOS mixed-signal ICs, in particular in rad-hard digital libraries and static memories (SRAMs), data converters, power management and testing techniques under irradiations. He holds 2 international patents, is co-author of more than 60 papers and serves also as reviewer for IEEE magazines and conferences. He is also Member of the Information Technology Commission at Engineers Professional Association of Pavia, where he takes care of  the organization of educational activities for Engineering Professionals.

First published: 8 September 2016