High performance analog and mixed signal circuits are strongly demanded in todays’ system on chip systems. They found pervasive applications in A/D or D/A conversion, power management, radio frequency (RF) signal sensing and processing, clock generation, etc.



In this special issue, we collected 7 comprehensive reviews and 2 research articles from leading research groups, which presented state-of-art design techniques and insight forecast of development trend in this hot area. W. Deng et al. reviewed design of signal generator for FMCW radar which is extremely useful in future ranging, communication and image applications. A review by Z. Zhang discussed in details on CMOS analog and mixed signal PLL principle, design issue and low jitter techniques. We have 2 reviews and 1 research article of cutting edge data converter. J. Liu et al. reviewed error suppression techniques for SAR ADCs which lead to superior energy efficiency. A survey by X. Li et al. presented state-of-art high speed design of DAC which is an important building block in 5G and optical data transfer systems. X. Pan et al. reported a very high efficiency SAR ADC with proposed NoC-assisted multiple adaptive by pass windows. We have another review by M. Huang et al. on digital LDO which is a good alternative to the analog LDO counterparts. L. Cheng et al. reported fast-transient DC–DC which achieved 1% setting time of only 125 ns. Furthermore, B. Tang et al. presented design of active quasi-circulator which is important in multi-band communication systems, and H. Chen et al. talked about another interesting topic on automated analog layout design which may change the design flow of analog circuits in the future. Finally, Prof. Pui-In Mak gave a glimpse of the lab-on-CMOS in-vitro diagnostic (IVD) tools for point-of-care applications.



We sincerely hope that the researchers working in this area could benefit a lot from the published papers in this special issue. And we also welcome the authors working in this area could contribute to Journal of Semiconductors.