Compound Semiconductors 1998 explores research and development in key semiconductor materials and III-V compounds such as gallium arsenide, indium phosphide, gallium nitride, silicon germanium, and silicon carbide. It critically assesses progress in key technologies such as reliability assessment and reports on advances in the use of semiconductors in modern electronic and optoelectronic devices. Coverage in this volume reflects the increased interest and research funding in nitride-based materials; wide band-gap devices; mobile communications, including III-V-based transistors and photonic devices; crystal growth and characterization; and nanoscale phenomena, such as quantum wires, dots, and other low dimensional structures.

Michael Hrobak studied hybrid integrated front end modules for high frequency measurement equipment and especially for synthetic automatic test systems. Recent developments of innovative, critical millimeter-wave components like frequency multipliers, directional couplers, filters, triple balanced mixers and power detectors are illustrated by the author separately and in combination.

The Principles and Application in Engineering Series is a new series of convenient, economical references sharply focused on particular engineering topics and subspecialties. Each volume in this series comprises chapters carefully selected from CRC's bestselling handbooks, logically organized for optimum convenience, and thoughtfully priced to fit

As their name implies, VLSI systems involve the integration of various component systems. While all of these components systems are rooted in semiconductor manufacturing, they involve a broad range of technologies. This volume of the Principles and Applications of Engineering series examines the technologies associated with VLSI systems, including

This book shows that digitally assisted analog to digital converters are not the only way to cope with poor analog performance caused by technology scaling. It describes various analog design techniques that enhance the area and power efficiency without employing any type of digital calibration circuitry. These techniques consist of self-biasing for PVT enhancement, inverter-based design for improved speed/power ratio, gain-of-two obtained by voltage sum instead of charge redistribution, and current-mode reference shifting instead of voltage reference shifting. Together, these techniques allow enhancing the area and power efficiency of the main building blocks of a multiplying digital-to-analog converter (MDAC) based stage, namely, the flash quantizer, the amplifier, and the switched capacitor network of the MDAC. Complementing the theoretical analyses of the various techniques, a power efficient operational transconductance amplifier is implemented and experimentally characterized. Furthermore, a medium-low resolution reference-free high-speed time-interleaved pipeline ADC employing all mentioned design techniques and circuits is presented, implemented and experimentally characterized. This ADC is said to be reference-free because it precludes any reference voltage, therefore saving power and area, as reference circuits are not necessary. Experimental results demonstrate the potential of the techniques which enabled the implementation of area and power efficient circuits.