Low voltage mixed analog/digital circuit design for portable equipment

Portable equipment such as compact disc players, camcorders, and cellular phones employ both analog and digital LSIs. In the future, portable equipment will use more complicated processing, such as audio/video compression and decompression technologies which need many more logic gates. But the use of analog circuits will continue in future portable equipment, even if such complicated digital processing is used. Hence, attention must be paid to the low voltage and low power design of mixed analog/digital circuits for portable equipment. Therefore, the author presents some viewpoints on the design of low voltage and low power digital and analog circuits with a focus on analog circuits technology rather than digital.