RF / VLSI Circuit Design

Mission

Wireless@Virginia Tech’s VLSI for Telecommunications Group’s mission is to develop innovative low-power VLSI designs for industry and academia, while providing a high caliber educational experience for graduate and undergraduate students pursuing careers in VLSI design. Our goal is to become a nationally renowned group in VLSI for wireless communications through quality publications and sponsored research, and the VTVT group is striving toward the goal through hard work and dedication.

Vision

Advancement of Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) technologies is the driving force for next generation wireless communications. Every generation of VLSI technology offers a new opportunity for more powerful and smaller wireless devices, but it also poses a technical challenge to curb ever growing power consumption. Low power VLSI design for wireless devices will remain as a critical research need for future wireless communication devices.

Need for Research

Development of low-power circuit and system design is essential for current and future wireless devices. Virtually all wireless devices include digital, analog/mixed signal and RF circuits, and hence low power design should target all of those circuits. The main focus of the VTVT Group is to address the technical needs.

Technical Approach

We combine expertise in circuit and system design to create a broad research framework for low power VLSI design. Broad knowledge and ample experience of Wireless@Virginia Tech in wireless system design is a distinctive advantage of the Center, which can be exploited for low power design at the system and architectural levels. We also investigate integration of digital circuits into analog/mixed signal and RF circuits, where digital circuits can assist in the reduction of the power for those circuits.

Areas of Research

• Analog, mixed-signal and RF circuit design
• Low-power VLSI system and circuit design
• Low-power application specific microcontroller units
• Power-line communications for vehicles, ships and airplanes
• Power conditioning circuits for energy harvesting
• Ultra wideband (UWB) circuits
• Wireless body area networks
• Wireless sensor nodes for structural health monitoring

A prototype for wireless sensor nodes for structural health monitoring