WORKSHOP

A One Week Coordinators’ Workshop on “CMOS, Mixed Signal and Radio Frequency VLSI Design” under the National Mission on Education through ICT (NMEICT) was organized at IIT Kharagpur during 19th – 23rd September, 2016. Prof. Vinod Kumar, HOD - ECE from Dronacharya Group of Institutions, Greater Noida attended the workshop. About 250 participants from different engineering colleges across the country attended the workshop.

The Recourse Persons for the workshop were:
1. Prof. T K Bhattacharya, IIT Kharagpur
2. Prof.  Indrajit Chakrabarti, IIT Kharagpur
3. Prof. Mrigank Sharad, IIT Kharagpur

The objective of the workshop was to provide an orientation and in-depth knowledge to the Faculty members who would act as Workshop Coordinators during the main workshop to be held during the end of December 2016 or last week of January 2017.

Day 1: 19th September 2016

The session was inaugurated by the Chief Guest Prof. Anil Dattatraya Sahasrabudhe, Chairman - AICTE with the lighting of lamp in the august presence

1. Prof. P. P. Chakrabarti (Director, IIT Kharagpur),
2. Prof. Raja Datta (Principal Investigator, T10KT, IIT Kharagpur),
3.  Prof. O. P. Sha (Co-principal Investigator, T10KT, IIT Kharagpur),
4. Prof. Pallav Das Gupta (Dean, Continuing Program, IIT Kharagpur)
5. Prof. T. K. Bhattacharya (Workshop Coordinator)
6. Prof. Indrajit Chakrabarti (Workshop Coordinator)
7. Prof. Mrigank Sharad (Workshop Coordinator)

Addressing the participants, Prof. Raja Datta said that the purpose of the workshop was to discuss the pedagogical aspect of teaching. Prof. Chakrabarti encouraged the participants to do something valuable during the workshop. In his keynote address, Prof. Sahasrabudhe said that unless the faculty is empowered, the quality of teaching cannot be enhanced. Prof. Pallav Das Gupta said that country has the potential of becoming the power house of the design of chip and all the forthcoming technology will be led by VLSI design.

After the inauguration, the 1st session started at 2:00 PM which was conducted by Prof. T. K. Bhattacharya, main coordinator of the workshop who covered the following topics during his lecture:
1. Introduction to RFIC Design.
2. Basic Rx-Tx.

He talked about the different application area of RFIC like wireless, radar, navigation, remote sensing etc.  Prof. Bhattacharya discussed in detail about RF circuits and systems, including Design Issue, Linearity Issue, Stability Issue and Sensitivity.

Day 2: 20th September 2016

The session of second day started at 9:30 AM with the lecture of Prof. Indrajit Chakrabarti. He covered the following topics during his lecture:

1. Low Power Digital Design.
2. Video Compression Architecture.

He said that two design methodologies are used for low power digital design. First is the voltage scaling approach and the second is system level approach. These methods are normally used to minimize the switched capacitances. He also discussed the glitches.

Post - lunch session was conducted by Prof. T. K. Bhattacharya. He covered the following topics during his lecture:
1. Low Noise Amplifier (LNA).
2. Voltage Control Oscillator (VCO).

At the end of his lecture he explained about VCO in detail.

Day 3: 21st September 2016

Session of day 3 started at 9:30 AM with the lecture of Prof. Mrigank Sharad. He covered the following topics:

1. Analog Front End (AFE) Design.
2. Filters.

Prof. Mrigank started his lecture on Analog Front End Design by explaining some application in different areas like agriculture, environment, safety, control, biomedical, robotics etc. He also talked about the differential amplifier and said that main advantage of differential amplifier is to reject the unwanted signal. He listed the desirable condition of differential amplifier like:
1. Maximal suppression of dynamic drift.
2. Low Power.
3. Low Area.
4. Robust: meet specifications across process corners.

Lecture of post - lunch session was conducted by Prof. Indrajit Chakrabarti on Video Compression Architecture. Mr. B. K. Srinivasrao (Research Scholar) organized the lab session and showed some results of video compression and also performed some experiments on FPGA.

Day 4: 22nd September 2016

Session started with the lecture of Prof. T. K. Bhattacharya. He covered the following topics during his lecture:
1. Mixers.
2. RF Power Amplifier.

He emphasized about the knowledge of schematic and post layout simulation when dealing with mixer design. Prof. Bhattacharya talked about the special considerations for mixer design and said that “passive mixing is not so popular as compared to active mixing. Isolation from low frequency domain to high frequency domain is very critical for mixer design. He also talked about the layout design of Analog and RF.

Post - lunch session was conducted by Prof. Mrigank Sharad. During the lecture, he covered Analog to Digital Converter (ADC).

During the last session of the day, Prof. Raja Datta along with the Administrative Team of T10KT, IIT Kharagpur, discussed the procedures for conducting the main workshop to be transmitted at different remote centres through A-View in the month of January 2017.

Day 5: 23rd September 2016

Last day’s session started with a lecture of power amplifier and frequency synthesizer by Prof. T. K. Bhattacharya.

He discussed about the characteristics of power amplifier, its function and key specifications like maximum output power, power added efficiency, power gain, linearity and stability. During the discussion about CMOS frequency synthesizer he said that higher the hopping range of frequency, lower the settling time. He also talked about the design of PLL.

Valedictory Ceremony of the workshop started after lunch on 23rd September 2016. Prof. Deepak. B. Pathak (Department of Computer Science, IIT Bombay), Professor P. P. Chakrabarti, Prof. Raja Datta, Prof. O. P. Sha, Prof. T. K. Bhattacharya, Prof. Indrajit Chakrabarti and Prof. Mrigank Sharad graced the ceremony. Prof. Raja Datta congratulated everyone for the successful completion of the workshop and distributed Certificate of Participation to all the participants. Finally, workshop ended with this hope that workshop coordinators will conduct the main workshop in a fruitful manner.