Seminar series Honolulu¶

Structured Electronics Design

is a systems engineering approach to the design of electronic circuits, solidly based on Signal Processing, Control Theory, Network Theory, and Device Physics.

The benefits of the Structured Electronics Design approach are:

• Straightforward top-down hierarchically organized design process

• Identical structure at each hierarchical level

• Specification-driven

• Early identification of show-stoppers

• Solid basis for analog design education

• Solid basis for analog design automation

Structured Electronics Design has been developed at the TU Delft (The Netherlands) since the eighties of the last century. Since then, many PhD candidates have developed well-defined design methods for amplifiers, harmonic oscillators, first-order oscillators, voltage and current references, transmitters, receivers, etc.

In this seminar Anton Montagne will elucidate and illustrate the structured approach to the design of negative feedback amplifiers, in both PCA and in CMOS technology. These seminars are compressed versions of the TU Delft courses EE3C11 and EE4109.

Anton J.M. Montagne

Anton Montagne (Leiden, 1953) studied electrical engineering at the The Hague Institute for Applied Sciences and at the Delft University of Technology where he received his master’s degree in 1984. In 1983 he joined Philips Semiconductors in Nijmegen where he designed analog integrated circuits for audio and video applications. At Philips, he also set up training courses on analog electronics. In 1986 he cofounded the product development company Product Partners where he carried out many analog designs in the field of instrumentation. In 1989, together with Catena Microelectronics, Delft University of Technology, and the Institute of Microelectronics in Stuttgart, he cooperated in the development of an intensive training course, covering many issues of analog information processing. Since 1997 he works as an independent consultant, trainer, and designer in the field of analog electronics. During the past 35 years, he carried out many training courses on analog electronics in Europe. Since 2019 he, together with Cris Verhoeven, develops new educational methods and material and teaches Structured Electronics Design at the TU Delft.

Anton Montagne is the inventor of several patents in the fields of IC technology, MEMS technology, sensor technology and high-stability X-tal oscillators. He is the author of the book Structured Electronics Design, and developed SLiCAP a Symbolic Linear Circuit Analysis Program, that supports the advocated design method.

Charles White

Charles White, (Louisville, 1988) Electrical Engineer Ph.D student at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He earned his Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. As a graduate student, he worked as a research assistant for Professor Gary Varner and collaborated with Nalu Scientific, where he designed voltage amplifiers, trans-impedance amplifiers, and timing generators. He took days and weeks iteratively testing all combinations to come to a solution. When he found Structured Electronics Design (SED), he discovered a renewed passion for the design flow, beginning from the application level and optimizing at each point down to the transistor level, which has reduced iterative design and maximized optimization. He was first introduced to SED through Cris Verhoevens’ text and the MOOC he offered through the University of Technology in Delft. During the Summer of 2022, he started taking SED with Anton Montagne over the span of 9 months. Presently, he is designing a vertex detector that will become a candidate solution for Belle II’s vertex detector in their particle collider experiments.