Development of Wireless Techniques in Data and Power Transmission - Application for Particle Physics Detectors

Wireless techniques have developed extremely fast over the last decade and using them for data and power transmission in particle physics detectors is not science- fiction any more. During the last years several research groups have independently thought of making it a reality. Wireless techniques became a mature field for research and new developments might have impact on future particle physics experiments. The Instrumentation Frontier was set up as a part of the SnowMass 2013 Community Summer Study [1] to examine the instrumentation R&D for the particle physics research over the coming decades: {\guillemotleft} To succeed we need to make technical and scientific innovation a priority in the field {\guillemotright}. Wireless data transmission was identified as one of the innovations that could revolutionize the transmission of data out of the detector. Power delivery was another challenge mentioned in the same report. We propose a collaboration to identify the specific needs of different projects that might benefit from wireless techniques. The objective is to provide a common platform for research and development in order to optimize effectiveness and cost, with the aim of designing and testing wireless demonstrators for large instrumentation systems

A 1.2 V and 69 mW 60 GHz Multi-channel Tunable CMOS Receiver Design

A multi-channel receiver operating between 56 GHz and 70 GHz for coverage of different 60 GHz bands worldwide is implemented with a 90 nm Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) process. The receiver containing an LNA, a frequency down-conversion mixer and a variable gain amplifier incorporating a band-pass filter is designed and implemented. This integrated receiver is tested at four channels of centre frequencies 58.3 GHz, 60.5 GHz, 62.6 GHz and 64.8 GHz, employing a frequency plan of an 8 GHz-intermediate frequency (IF). The achieved conversion gain by coarse gain control is between 4.8 dB–54.9 dB. The millimeter-wave receiver circuit is biased with a 1.2V supply voltage. The measured power consumption is 69 mW

Mm-wave integrated wireless transceiver: enabling technology for high bandwidth short-range networking in cyber physical systems

Emerging application scenarios for Cyber Physical Systems often require the networking of sensing and actuation nodes at high data rate and through wireless links. Lot of surveillance and control systems adopt as input sensors distributed video cameras operating at different spectral ranges and covering different fields of view. Arrays of radio/light detection and ranging (Radar/Lidar) sensors are often used to detect the presence of targets, of their speeds, distance and direction. The relevant bandwidth requirement amounts to some Gbps. The wireless connection is essential for easy and flexible deployment of the sensing/actuation nodes. A key technology to keep low the size and weight of the nodes is the fully integration at mm-waves of wireless transceivers sustaining Gbps data rate. To this aim, this paper presents the design of 60 GHz transceiver key blocks (Low Noise Amplifier, Power Amplifier, Antenna) to ensure connection distances up to 10 m and data rate of several Gbps. Around 60 GHz there are freely-available (unlicensed) worldwide several GHz of bandwidth. By using a CMOS Silicon-on-Insulator technology RF, analog and digital baseband circuitry can be integrated single-chip minimizing noise coupling. At mm-wave the wavelength is few mm and hence even the antenna is integrated on chip reducing cost and size vs. off-chip antenna solutions. The proposed transceiver enables at physical layer the implementation in compact nodes of links with data rates of several Gbps and up to 10 m distance; this is suited for home/office scenarios, or on-board vehicles (cars, trains, ships, airplanes) or body area networks for healthcare and wellness

Millimeter-wave Evolution for 5G Cellular Networks

Triggered by the explosion of mobile traffic, 5G (5th Generation) cellular network requires evolution to increase the system rate 1000 times higher than the current systems in 10 years. Motivated by this common problem, there are several studies to integrate mm-wave access into current cellular networks as multi-band heterogeneous networks to exploit the ultra-wideband aspect of the mm-wave band. The authors of this paper have proposed comprehensive architecture of cellular networks with mm-wave access, where mm-wave small cell basestations and a conventional macro basestation are connected to Centralized-RAN (C-RAN) to effectively operate the system by enabling power efficient seamless handover as well as centralized resource control including dynamic cell structuring to match the limited coverage of mm-wave access with high traffic user locations via user-plane/control-plane splitting. In this paper, to prove the effectiveness of the proposed 5G cellular networks with mm-wave access, system level simulation is conducted by introducing an expected future traffic model, a measurement based mm-wave propagation model, and a centralized cell association algorithm by exploiting the C-RAN architecture. The numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed network to realize 1000 times higher system rate than the current network in 10 years which is not achieved by the small cells using commonly considered 3.5 GHz band. Furthermore, the paper also gives latest status of mm-wave devices and regulations to show the feasibility of using mm-wave in the 5G systems.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, accepted to be published in IEICE Transactions on Communications. (Mar. 2015

Design Exploration of mm-Wave Integrated Transceivers for Short-Range Mobile Communications Towards 5G

This paper presents a design exploration, at both system and circuit levels, of integrated transceivers for the upcoming fifth generation (5G) of wireless communications. First, a system level model for 5G communications is carried out to derive transceiver design specifications. Being 5G still in pre-standardization phase, a few currently used standards (ECMA-387, IEEE 802.15.3c, and LTE-A) are taken into account as the reference for the signal format. Following a top-down flow, this work presents the design in 65nm CMOS SOI and bulk technologies of the key blocks of a fully integrated transceiver: low noise amplifier (LNA), power amplifier (PA) and on-chip antenna. Different circuit topologies are presented and compared allowing for different trade-offs between gain, power consumption, noise figure, output power, linearity, integration cost and link performance. The best configuration of antenna and LNA co-design results in a peak gain higher than 27dB, a noise figure below 5dB and a power consumption of 35mW. A linear PA design is presented to face the high Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR) of multi-carrier transmissions envisaged for 5G, featuring a 1dB compression point output power (OP1dB) of 8.2dBm. The delivered output power in the linear region can be increased up to 13.2dBm by combining four basic PA blocks through a Wilkinson power combiner/divider circuit. The proposed circuits are shown to enable future 5G connections, operating in a mm-wave spectrum range (spanning 9GHz, from 57GHz to 66GHz), with a data-rate of several Gb/s in a short-range scenario, spanning from few centimeters to tens of meters

Millimeter-wave Communication and Radar Sensing — Opportunities, Challenges, and Solutions

With the development of communication and radar sensing technology, people are able to seek for a more convenient life and better experiences. The fifth generation (5G) mobile network provides high speed communication and internet services with a data rate up to several gigabit per second (Gbps). In addition, 5G offers great opportunities of emerging applications, for example, manufacture automation with the help of precise wireless sensing. For future communication and sensing systems, increasing capacity and accuracy is desired, which can be realized at millimeter-wave spectrum from 30 GHz to 300 GHz with several tens of GHz available bandwidth. Wavelength reduces at higher frequency, this implies more compact transceivers and antennas, and high sensing accuracy and imaging resolution. Challenges arise with these application opportunities when it comes to realizing prototype or demonstrators in practice. This thesis proposes some of the solutions addressing such challenges in a laboratory environment.High data rate millimeter-wave transmission experiments have been demonstrated with the help of advanced instrumentations. These demonstrations show the potential of transceiver chipsets. On the other hand, the real-time communication demonstrations are limited to either low modulation order signals or low symbol rate transmissions. The reason for that is the lack of commercially available high-speed analog-to-digital converters (ADCs); therefore, conventional digital synchronization methods are difficult to implement in real-time systems at very high data rates. In this thesis, two synchronous baseband receivers are proposed with carrier recovery subsystems which only require low-speed ADCs [A][B].Besides synchronization, high-frequency signal generation is also a challenge in millimeter-wave communications. The frequency divider is a critical component of a millimeter-wave frequency synthesizer. Having both wide locking range and high working frequencies is a challenge. In this thesis, a tunable delay gated ring oscillator topology is proposed for dual-mode operation and bandwidth extension [C]. Millimeter-wave radar offers advantages for high accuracy sensing. Traditional millimeter-wave radar with frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW), or continuous-wave (CW), all have their disadvantages. Typically, the FMCW radar cannot share the spectrum with other FMCW radars.\ua0 With limited bandwidth, the number of FMCW radars that could coexist in the same area is limited. CW radars have a limited ambiguous distance of a wavelength. In this thesis, a phase-modulated radar with micrometer accuracy is presented [D]. It is applicable in a multi-radar scenario without occupying more bandwidth, and its ambiguous distance is also much larger than the CW radar. Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) radar has similar properties. However, its traditional fast calculation method, fast Fourier transform (FFT), limits its measurement accuracy. In this thesis, an accuracy enhancement technique is introduced to increase the measurement accuracy up to the micrometer level [E]

0.42 THz Transmitter with Dielectric Resonator Array Antenna

Off chip antennas do not occupy the expensive die area, as there is no limitation on their building material, and can be built in any size and shape to match the system requirements, which are all in contrast to on-chip antenna solutions. However, integration of off-chip antennas with Monolithic-Microwave-Integrated Chips (MMIC) and designing a low loss signal transmission from the signal source inside the MMIC to the antenna module is a major challenge and trade off. High resistivity silicon (HRS), is a low cost and extremely low loss material at sub-THz. It has become a prevailing material in fabrication of passive components for THz applications. This work makes use of HRS to build an off-chip Dielectric Resonator Antenna Array Module (DRAAM) to realize a highly efficient transmitter at 420 GHz. This work proposes novel techniques and solutions for design and integration of DRRAM with MMIC as the signal source. A proposed scalable 4×4 antenna structure aligns DRRAM on top of MMIC within 2 μm accuracy through an effortless assembly procedure. DRAAM shows 15.8 dB broadside gain and 0.85 efficiency. DRAs in the DRAAM are differentially excited through aperture coupling. Differential excitation not only inherently provides a mechanism to deliver more power to the antenna, it also removes the additional loss of extra balluns when outputs are differential inside MMIC. In addition, this work proposes a technique to double the radiation power from each DRA. Same radiating mode at 0.42 THz inside every DRA is excited through two separate differential sources. This approach provides an almost loss-less power combining mechanism inside DRA. Two 140_GHz oscillators followed by triplers drive each DRA in the demonstrated 4×4 antenna array. Each oscillator generates 7.2 dBm output power at 140 GHz with -83 dBc/Hz phase noise at 100 KHz and consumes 25 mW of power. An oscillator is followed by a tripler that generates -8 dBm output power at 420 GHz. Oscillator and tripler circuits use a smart layer stack up arrangement for their passive elements where the top metal layer of the die is grounded to comply with the planned integration arrangement. This work shows a novel circuit topology for exciting the antenna element which creates the feed element part of the tuned load for the tripler circuit, therefore eliminates the loss of the transition component, and maximizes the output power delivered to the antenna. The final structure is composed of 32 injection locked oscillators and drives a 4×4 DRAAM achieves 22.8 dBm EIRP

Four-element phased-array beamformers and a self-interference canceling full-duplex transciver in 130-nm SiGe for 5G applications at 26 GHz

This thesis is on the design of radio-frequency (RF) integrated front-end circuits for next generation 5G communication systems. The demand for higher data rates and lower latency in 5G networks can only be met using several new technologies including, but not limited to, mm-waves, massive-MIMO, and full-duplex. Use of mm-waves provides more bandwidth that is necessary for high data rates at the cost of increased attenuation in air. Massive-MIMO arrays are required to compensate for this increased path loss by providing beam steering and array gain. Furthermore, full duplex operation is desirable for improved spectrum efficiency and reduced latency. The difficulty of full duplex operation is the self-interference (SI) between transmit (TX) and receive (RX) paths. Conventional methods to suppress this interference utilize either bulky circulators, isolators, couplers or two separate antennas. These methods are not suitable for fully-integrated full-duplex massive-MIMO arrays. This thesis presents circuit and system level solutions to the issues summarized above, in the form of SiGe integrated circuits for 5G applications at 26 GHz. First, a full-duplex RF front-end architecture is proposed that is scalable to massive-MIMO arrays. It is based on blind, RF self-interference cancellation that is applicable to single/shared antenna front-ends. A high resolution RF vector modulator is developed, which is the key building block that empowers the full-duplex frontend architecture by achieving better than state-of-the-art 10-b monotonic phase control. This vector modulator is combined with linear-in-dB variable gain amplifiers and attenuators to realize a precision self-interference cancellation circuitry. Further, adaptive control of this SI canceler is made possible by including an on-chip low-power IQ downconverter. It correlates copies of transmitted and received signals and provides baseband/dc outputs that can be used to adaptively control the SI canceler. The solution comes at the cost of minimal additional circuitry, yet significantly eases linearity requirements of critical receiver blocks at RF/IF such as mixers and ADCs. Second, to complement the proposed full-duplex front-end architecture and to provide a more complete solution, high-performance beamformer ICs with 5-/6- b phase and 3-/4-b amplitude control capabilities are designed. Single-channel, separate transmitter and receiver beamformers are implemented targeting massive- MIMO mode of operation, and their four-channel versions are developed for phasedarray communication systems. Better than state-of-the-art noise performance is obtained in the RX beamformer channel, with a full-channel noise figure of 3.3 d

Ball grid array-module with integrated shaped lens for WiGig applications in eyewear devices

A ball grid array-module (BGA-module) incorporating a low-cost shaped dielectric lens is proposed for wireless communications in the 60-GHz WiGig band between a smart eye-wear, where it is integrated and facing a laptop or TV. The module, which is codesigned with a 60-GHz transceiver, consists of two separate identical antennas for transmitting (Tx) and receiving (Rx). The in-plane separation of these elements is 6.9 mm both being offset from the lens focus. This poses a challenge to the lens design to ensure coincident beam pointing directions for Rx and Tx. The shaped lens is further required to narrow the angular coverage in the elevation plane and broaden it in the horizontal plane. A 3-D-printed eyewear frame with an integrated lens and a recess for proper BGA-module integration is fabricated in ABS-plastic material. Measurements show a reflection coefficient below -12 dB in the 57-66 GHz band. A maximum gain of 11 dBi is obtained at 60 GHz, with 24 degrees and 96 degrees beamwidth at 5-dBi gain, respectively, in the vertical and horizontal planes. The radiation exposure is evaluated for a homogeneous SAM head phantom and a heterogeneous visible human head. The simulated power density values for both models are found to be lower than the existing standards