1,694 research outputs found
High-speed communication circuits: voltage control oscillators and VCO-derived filters
Voltage Controlled Oscillators (VCO) and filters are the two main topics of focus in this dissertation.;A temperature and process compensated VCO, which is designed to operate at 2 GHz, and whose frequency variation due to incoming data is limited to 1% of its center frequency was presented. The test results show that, without process changes present, the frequency variation due to a temperature change over 0°C to 100°C is around 1.1% of its center frequency. This is a reduction of a factor of 10 when compared to the temperature variation of a conventional VCO.;A new method of designing continuous-time monolithic filters derived from well-known voltage controlled oscillators (VCOs) was introduced. These VCO-derived filters are capable of operating at very high frequencies in standard CMOS processes. Prototype low-pass and band-pass filters designed in a TSMC 0.25 mum process are discussed. Simulation results for the low-pass filter designed for a cutoff frequency of 4.3 GHz show a THD of -40 dB for a 200 mV peak-peak sinusoidal input. The band-pass filter has a resonant frequency programmable from 2.3 GHz to 3.1 GHz, a programmable Q from 3 to 85, and mid-band THD of -40 dB for an 80 mV peak-peak sinusoidal input signal.;A third contribution in this dissertation was the design of a new current mirror with accurate mirror gain for low beta bipolar transistors. High mirror gain accuracy is achieved by using a split-collector transistor to compensate for base currents of the source-coupled
Process and Temperature Compensated Wideband Injection Locked Frequency Dividers and their Application to Low-Power 2.4-GHz Frequency Synthesizers
There has been a dramatic increase in wireless awareness among the user community in the past five years. The 2.4-GHz Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band is being used for a diverse range of applications due to the following reasons. It is the only unlicensed band approved worldwide and it offers more bandwidth and supports higher data rates compared to the 915-MHz ISM band. The power consumption of devices utilizing the 2.4-GHz band is much lower compared to the 5.2-GHz ISM band. Protocols like Bluetooth and Zigbee that utilize the 2.4-GHz ISM band are becoming extremely popular.
Bluetooth is an economic wireless solution for short range connectivity between PC, cell phones, PDAs, Laptops etc. The Zigbee protocol is a wireless technology that was developed as an open global standard to address the unique needs of low-cost, lowpower, wireless sensor networks. Wireless sensor networks are becoming ubiquitous, especially after the recent terrorist activities. Sensors are employed in strategic locations for real-time environmental monitoring, where they collect and transmit data frequently to a nearby terminal. The devices operating in this band are usually compact and battery powered. To enhance battery life and avoid the cumbersome task of battery replacement, the devices used should consume extremely low power. Also, to meet the growing demands cost and sized has to be kept low which mandates fully monolithic implementation using low cost process.
CMOS process is extremely attractive for such applications because of its low cost and the possibility to integrate baseband and high frequency circuits on the same chip. A fully integrated solution is attractive for low power consumption as it avoids the need for power hungry drivers for driving off-chip components. The transceiver is often the most power hungry block in a wireless communication system. The frequency divider (prescaler) and the voltage controlled oscillator in the transmitter’s frequency synthesizer are among the major sources of power consumption. There have been a number of publications in the past few decades on low-power high-performance VCOs. Therefore this work focuses on prescalers.
A class of analog frequency dividers called as Injection-Locked Frequency Dividers (ILFD) was introduced in the recent past as low power frequency division. ILFDs can consume an order of magnitude lower power when compared to conventional flip-flop based dividers. However the range of operation frequency also knows as the locking range is limited. ILFDs can be classified as LC based and Ring based. Though LC based are insensitive to process and temperature variation, they cannot be used for the 2.4-GHz ISM band because of the large size of on-chip inductors at these frequencies. This causes a lot of valuable chip area to be wasted. Ring based ILFDs are compact and provide a low power solution but are extremely sensitive to process and temperature variations. Process and temperature variation can cause ring based ILFD to loose lock in the desired operating band.
The goal of this work is to make the ring based ILFDs useful for practical applications. Techniques to extend the locking range of the ILFDs are discussed. A novel and simple compensation technique is devised to compensate the ILFD and keep the locking range tight with process and temperature variations. The proposed ILFD is used in a 2.4-GHz frequency synthesizer that is optimized for fractional-N synthesis. Measurement results supporting the theory are provided
Long-term Stabilization of Fiber Laser Using Phase-locking Technique with Ultra-low Phase Noise and Phase Drift
We review the conventional phase-locking technique in the long-term
stabilization of the mode-locked fiber laser and investigate the phase noise
limitation of the conventional technique. To break the limitation, we propose
an improved phase-locking technique with an optic-microwave phase detector in
achieving the ultra-low phase noise and phase drift. The mechanism and the
theoretical model of the novel phase-locking technique are also discussed. The
long-term stabilization experiments demonstrate that the improved technique can
achieve the long-term stabilization for the MLFL with ultra-low phase noise and
phase drift. The excellent locking performance of the improved phase-locking
technique implies that this technique can be used to stabilize the mode-locked
fiber laser with the highly stable H-master or optical clock without stability
loss
A Fully Integrated 24-GHz Eight-Element Phased-Array Receiver in Silicon
This paper reports the first fully integrated 24-GHz eight-element phased-array receiver in a SiGe BiCMOS technology. The receiver utilizes a heterodyne topology and the signal combining is performed at an IF of 4.8 GHz. The phase-shifting with 4 bits of resolution is realized at the LO port of the first down-conversion mixer. A ring LC voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) generates 16 different phases of the LO. An integrated 19.2-GHz frequency synthesizer locks the VCO frequency to a 75-MHz external reference. Each signal path achieves a gain of 43 dB, a noise figure of 7.4 dB, and an IIP3 of -11 dBm. The eight-path array achieves an array gain of 61 dB and a peak-to-null ratio of 20 dB and improves the signal-to-noise ratio at the output by 9 dB
Attosecond Precision Multi-km Laser-Microwave Network
Synchronous laser-microwave networks delivering attosecond timing precision
are highly desirable in many advanced applications, such as geodesy,
very-long-baseline interferometry, high-precision navigation and
multi-telescope arrays. In particular, rapidly expanding photon science
facilities like X-ray free-electron lasers and intense laser beamlines require
system-wide attosecond-level synchronization of dozens of optical and microwave
signals up to kilometer distances. Once equipped with such precision, these
facilities will initiate radically new science by shedding light on molecular
and atomic processes happening on the attosecond timescale, such as
intramolecular charge transfer, Auger processes and their impact on X-ray
imaging. Here, we present for the first time a complete synchronous
laser-microwave network with attosecond precision, which is achieved through
new metrological devices and careful balancing of fiber nonlinearities and
fundamental noise contributions. We demonstrate timing stabilization of a
4.7-km fiber network and remote optical-optical synchronization across a 3.5-km
fiber link with an overall timing jitter of 580 and 680 attoseconds RMS,
respectively, for over 40 hours. Ultimately we realize a complete
laser-microwave network with 950-attosecond timing jitter for 18 hours. This
work can enable next-generation attosecond photon-science facilities to
revolutionize many research fields from structural biology to material science
and chemistry to fundamental physics.Comment: 42 pages, 13 figure
Wideband phase-locked angular modulator
A phase-locked loop (PLL) angular modulator scheme has been proposed which has the characteristics of wideband modulation frequency response. The modulator design is independent of the PLL closed-loop transfer function H(s), thereby allowing independent optimization of the loop's parameters as well as the modulator's parameters. A phase modulator implementing the proposed scheme was built to phase modulate a low-noise phase-locked signal source at the output frequency of 2290 MHz. The measurement results validated the analysis by demonstrating that the resulting baseband modulation bandwidth exceeded that of the phase-locked loop by over an order of magnitude. However, it is expected to be able to achieve much wider response still
Basics of RF electronics
RF electronics deals with the generation, acquisition and manipulation of
high-frequency signals. In particle accelerators signals of this kind are
abundant, especially in the RF and beam diagnostics systems. In modern machines
the complexity of the electronics assemblies dedicated to RF manipulation, beam
diagnostics, and feedbacks is continuously increasing, following the demands
for improvement of accelerator performance. However, these systems, and in
particular their front-ends and back-ends, still rely on well-established basic
hardware components and techniques, while down-converted and acquired signals
are digitally processed exploiting the rapidly growing computational capability
offered by the available technology. This lecture reviews the operational
principles of the basic building blocks used for the treatment of
high-frequency signals. Devices such as mixers, phase and amplitude detectors,
modulators, filters, switches, directional couplers, oscillators, amplifiers,
attenuators, and others are described in terms of equivalent circuits,
scattering matrices, transfer functions; typical performance of commercially
available models is presented. Owing to the breadth of the subject, this review
is necessarily synthetic and non-exhaustive. Readers interested in the
architecture of complete systems making use of the described components and
devoted to generation and manipulation of the signals driving RF power plants
and cavities may refer to the CAS lectures on Low-Level RF.Comment: 36 pages, contribution to the CAS - CERN Accelerator School:
Specialised Course on RF for Accelerators; 8 - 17 Jun 2010, Ebeltoft, Denmar
S and Ku band frequency source development
The results of the two part S- and Ku-band source development program are described. The S- and Ku-band sources were designed, fabricated, and evaluated. A high performance S- and Ku-band microwave signal source using state-of-the-art oscillator and microwave source technology was developed
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