System design from instrument level down to ASIC transistors with speed and low power as driving parameters

Abstract

For wide bandwidth spectrometers there are several competing technologies to consider, digital, optical and various analog schemes. For applications demanding wide bandwidth and low power consumption in combination, autocorrelation based digital designs take advantage of Moores law and will take a dominating position in the coming years. Omnisys implementations have shown an order of magnitude better performance in respect to bandwidth versus power consumption as compared to what other teams has presented over the last decade. The reason for this is concurrent engineering and optimisation has been performed at all levels in parallel, from instrument level down to transistor level. We now have a single chip spectrometer core providing 8 GHz of bandwidth with 1024 resolution channels and a power consumption of less than 3 W. The design approach will be presented with examples of how decisions on different levels interact © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.