Minimum-effort design of ultra-low power interfaces for the internet of things

This paper briefly summarized a recent research activity intended to substantially enhance the scalability of analog blocks with technology and voltage by re-thinking analog functions in ICs in digital terms. On the contrary, the implementation of analog functions, which are however essential to acquire data from sensors, is nowadays the real bottleneck and the most serious concern and limiting factor for the further development of IoT applications. In the foreseeable cross-domain approach, design and testing methodologies from the digital world will be extended and frontier design concepts like near-threshold operation further exploited.