Proceedings of the International Conference on Engineering Research, Innovation and Education 2011 CERIE 2011, 11-13 January, Sylhet, Bangladesh Vol.2, pp. 730-734 * Corresponding Author: M.S.R. Shoaib, E-mail: shoaibeee@gmail.com ISBN: 978-984-33-2140-4 VLSI DESIGN OF AN ULTRA-LOW-POWER FUNCTIONAL CHIP USING MIRROR-AMPLIFIER FOR PRECISION SENSOR APPLICATIONS Imran Chowdhury 1 , Rumana Amin 1 , M.S.R. Shoaib 1,2,3 , Dr. Shuza Binzaid 4 1 Deparetment of Electronics and Communication Eng. (ECE) 1 University of Information Technology and Sciences (UITS), Dhaka, Bangladesh 2 Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Dhaka 3 Bioelectric Research Lab, Dhaka, Bangladesh 4 Founder and Director, SERES, seres-usa.com Device density in VLSI today enforces the process of chip designing much more complex; whereas MAGIC CAD tools made the IC design in this work, comparatively easier. Study on various amplifiers for sensor applications showed that their powers ranged from a few milliamperes to a few hundred milliamperes at the submicron fabrication processes by MOSIS, but within the affordable cost. Objectives of lowering the power at least by 1000 times in those fabrication processes engaged this research towards completing a new design, called the mirror-amplifier. This design is verified for precise functional behavior for the sensor and total power consumption, using MAGIC extractor and PSPICE electrical simulation tools. A compact model chip layout made silicon area more efficient for MOSIS tiny-chip fabrication in 0.6μm processes. To make even more economical, a multi-die placement technique was applied to the chip layout for this tiny-chip in silicon area of 1500μmX1500μm. MOSIS design rules for multi-die fabrication was verified for process scribe-lines and die packaging. This paper presents details of the key research works, results, completed chip layout and packaging of the chip. Key words: Mirror-Amplifier; Compound Device; Mixed-Signal Chip; Precision Sensor; Chip Package. 1. INTRODUCTION As MOS Integrated Circuits (ICs) have come to dominate analog, digital, and mixed-signal electronic circuit designs over the last 15 years [1], the pressure to reduce system cost has favored all- CMOS solutions over systems that mix bipolar and CMOS chips or use Bi-CMOS technology [2]. In current design practices, bipolar devices are usually found only in very-high performance wired and wireless designs, where extreme device specifications (high f t , low noise, and superior matching) require high-yielding, power-efficient components [3]. Similarly, compound semiconductor devices are used only in the case of very high-speed circuits in applications running at GHz level with low power [1]. With a continuing reduction of MOS transistor channel lengths, modern CMOS silicon processes offer transistor with a higher cut off frequencies [4]. So as it is known that CMOS technology is capable to implement radio frequency (RF) transceivers, recently many researches on radio frequency (RF) ICs in GHz-level-band have been accelerated because of the potential Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) band and the wireless vehicular radar applications [5-6, etc.]. CMOS processes that have been developed primarily for logic are now also used as amplifier and sensor [7]. Several researchers have presented CMOS amplifiers for an optical receiver with external photo detectors [8-10, etc.]. Most of these amplifiers depend on analog CMOS process technologies. Recently, there have been attempts to use standard digital CMOS technologies since there are more demands to have analog and digital circuits on same chip allowing a very high bandwidth and very low power at the same time [10]. Today’s electronics industry is increasingly focused on the consumer marketplace, which requires low- cost high-volume products to be developed very rapidly. This, combined with advances in deep sub- micron technology has resulted in the ability and the need to put entire systems on a single chip. As more of the system is included on a single chip, it is very likely the chip will contain both analog and digital sections, which make the IC, design