Special Issue on the Fourth European Solid-State Circuits Conference (ESSCIRC)

THIS year’s conference showed again that analog circuit design tends to shift from bipolar circuitry towards MOS circuitry because of the low power dissipation and the simplicity of combination with LSI digital circuitry. The first paper by Jespers gives a review of the application of charge-transfer devices for signal processing systems. An electrical programming method for CCD transversal filters is introduced by Wallinga and Hylkema. Cuppens et al. give a method to simulate large capacitors and inductors using an analog sampleddata system. Fiedler and Seitzer apply a multiple folding circuit to reduce the number of comparators in a high speed A/D converter. The high speed is obtained by using a bipolar technology. Another bipolar paper by van de Plassche and Goedhart describes a 14-bit D/A converter using dynamic element matching to obtain a high bit weighting accuracy. The two papers by Kessler and Jiru and Hoefflinger et al. use a combination of LSI digital and analog MOS circuits to obtain a complete system on one chip (digital voltmeter, data acquisition system). Ber@-nann on the other hand uses a bipolar technology which combines analog and digital functions to implement a controller for domestic appliances (12L’ circuitry). Vittoz and Neyroud elegantly use the parasitic bipolar transistor action of a CMOS process to design, with a MOS PTAT voltage source, a well-known bandgap reference source. In the two correspondences Vittoz describes a very low power oscillator using a sampled-data system implemented on