A low-power low-voltage digital bus interface for MCM-based microsystems

This paper describes a digital local bus interface, which is designed for use in a multi-chip-composed microsystem. The chip area using a CMOS 1.6µm n-well technology is 1mm². Power consumption at 5V@100kHz is less than 500µW and for 5V@4MHz less than 2mW due to a smart power management of all functional blocks. The bus interface is able to transmit a digital code, bitstream, analog voltage, frequency, duty-cycle and also provides calibration facilities, service request and interrupt request for the smart sensors or microactuators.