Towards an optimal trade-off of functional requirements against size, power and cost for phased array asics

Abstract – In this paper, we investigate various technologies and trade-offs used for manufacturing of integrated circuits with respect to their performance characteristics such as RF frequency, gain, noise figure, linearity and power consumption. This investigation is crucial for design of transceivers at microwave and higher frequencies. In the following, we show the in-house designed prototype of a highly integrated X- and Ku-band planar phased array receiver, having 8 channels and 64 antenna elements based on this investigation. The die size of the 8-channel phased array receiver with 2 GHz IF-bandwidth is 4 mm × 3.8 mm and the size of the prototype is 11 cm × 9.5 c

A 14-mW PLL-less receiver in 0.18-μm CMOS for Chinese electronic toll collection standard

This is the accepted manuscript version of the following article: Xiaofeng He, et al., “A 14-mW PLL-less receiver in 0.18-μm CMOS for Chinese electronic toll collection standard”, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs, Vol. 61(10): 763-767, August 2014. The final published version is available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6871304/ © 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The design of a 14-mW receiver without phase-locked loop for the Chinese electronic toll collection (ETC) system in a standard 0.18-μm CMOS process is presented in this brief. Since the previously published work was mainly based on vehicle-powered systems, low power consumption was not the primary goal of such a system. In contrast, the presented system is designed for a battery-powered system. Utilizing the presented receiver architecture, the entire receiver only consumes 7.8 mA, at the supply voltage of 1.8 V, which indicates a power saving of at least 38% compared with other state-of-the-art designs for the same application. To verify the performance, the bit error rate is measured to be better than 10-6, which well satisfies the Chinese ETC standard. Moreover, the sensitivity of the designed receiver can be readjusted to -50 dBm, which is required by the standard.Peer reviewe

A Comparative Study Between a Micromechanical Cantilever Resonator and MEMS-based Passives for Band-pass Filtering Application

Over the past few years, significant growth has been observed in using MEMS based passive components in the RF microelectronics domain, especially in transceiver components. This is due to some excellent properties of the MEMS devices like low loss, excellent isolation etc. in the microwave frequency domain where the on-chip passives normally tend to become leakier and degrades the transceiver performance. This paper presents a comparative analysis between MEMS-resonator based and MEMS-passives based band-pass filter configurations for RF applications, along with their design, simulation, fabrication and characterization. The filters were designed to have a center frequency of 455 kHz, meant for use as the intermediate frequency (IF) filter in superheterodyne receivers. The filter structures have been fabricated in PolyMUMPs process, a three-polysilicon layer surface micromachining process.Comment: 6 pages, 15 figure

Energy-Efficient Wireless Circuits and Systems for Internet of Things

As the demand of ultra-low power (ULP) systems for internet of thing (IoT) applications has been increasing, large efforts on evolving a new computing class is actively ongoing. The evolution of the new computing class, however, faced challenges due to hard constraints on the RF systems. Significant efforts on reducing power of power-hungry wireless radios have been done. The ULP radios, however, are mostly not standard compliant which poses a challenge to wide spread adoption. Being compliant with the WiFi network protocol can maximize an ULP radio’s potential of utilization, however, this standard demands excessive power consumption of over 10mW, that is hardly compatible with in ULP systems even with heavy duty-cycling. Also, lots of efforts to minimize off-chip components in ULP IoT device have been done, however, still not enough for practical usage without a clean external reference, therefore, this limits scaling on cost and form-factor of the new computer class of IoT applications. This research is motivated by those challenges on the RF systems, and each work focuses on radio designs for IoT applications in various aspects. First, the research covers several endeavors for relieving energy constraints on RF systems by utilizing existing network protocols that eventually meets both low-active power, and widespread adoption. This includes novel approaches on 802.11 communication with articulate iterations on low-power RF systems. The research presents three prototypes as power-efficient WiFi wake-up receivers, which bridges the gap between industry standard radios and ULP IoT radios. The proposed WiFi wake-up receivers operate with low power consumption and remain compatible with the WiFi protocol by using back-channel communication. Back-channel communication embeds a signal into a WiFi compliant transmission changing the firmware in the access point, or more specifically just the data in the payload of the WiFi packet. With a specific sequence of data in the packet, the transmitter can output a signal that mimics a modulation that is more conducive for ULP receivers, such as OOK and FSK. In this work, low power mixer-first receivers, and the first fully integrated ultra-low voltage receiver are presented, that are compatible with WiFi through back-channel communication. Another main contribution of this work is in relieving the integration challenge of IoT devices by removing the need for external, or off-chip crystals and antennas. This enables a small form-factor on the order of mm3-scale, useful for medical research and ubiquitous sensing applications. A crystal-less small form factor fully integrated 60GHz transceiver with on-chip 12-channel frequency reference, and good peak gain dual-mode on-chip antenna is presented.PHDElectrical and Computer EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162975/1/jaeim_1.pd