Sensing of single electrons using micro and nano technologies: a review.

During the last three decades, the remarkable dynamic features of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS), and advances in solid-state electronics hold much potential for the fabrication of extremely sensitive charge sensors. These sensors have a broad range of applications, such as those involving the measurement of ionization radiation, detection of bio-analyte and aerosol particles, mass spectrometry, scanning tunneling microscopy, and quantum computation. Designing charge sensors (also known as charge electrometers) for electrometry is deemed significant because of the sensitivity and resolution issues in the range of micro- and nano-scales. This article reviews the development of state-of-the-art micro- and nano-charge sensors, and discusses their technological challenges for practical implementation.

Designing a ring-VCO for RFID transponders in 0.18 µm CMOS process.

In radio frequency identification (RFID) systems, performance degradation of phase locked loops (PLLs) mainly occurs due to high phase noise of voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs). This paper proposes a low power, low phase noise ring-VCO developed for 2.42 GHz operated active RFID transponders compatible with IEEE 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth, and Zigbee protocols. For ease of integration and implementation of the module in tiny die area, a novel pseudodifferential delay cell based 3-stage ring oscillator has been introduced to fabricate the ring-VCO. In CMOS technology, 0.18 µm process is adopted for designing the circuit with 1.5 V power supply. The postlayout simulated results show that the proposed oscillator works in the tuning range of 0.5-2.54 GHz and dissipates 2.47 mW of power. It exhibits a phase noise of -126.62 dBc/Hz at 25 MHz offset from 2.42 GHz carrier frequency.