High frequency of low noise amplifier architecture for WiMAX application: A review

The low noise amplifier (LNA) circuit is exceptionally imperative as it promotes and initializes general execution performance and quality of the mobile communication system. LNA's design in radio frequency (R.F.) circuit requires the trade-off numerous imperative features' including gain, noise figure (N.F.), bandwidth, stability, sensitivity, power consumption, and complexity. Improvements to the LNA's overall performance should be made to fulfil the worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) specifications' prerequisites. The development of front-end receiver, particularly the LNA, is genuinely pivotal for long-distance communications up to 50 km for a particular system with particular requirements. The LNA architecture has recently been designed to concentrate on a single transistor, cascode, or cascade constrained in gain, bandwidth, and noise figure

A 0.18-μm BICMOS 20-57 GHz Ultra-Wideband Low-Noise Amplifier Utilizing Frequency-Controlled Positive-Negative Feedback Technique

Silicon based complementary metallic oxide semiconductor (CMOS) and Bipolar Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (BiCMOS) radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs), including microwave and millimeter-wave (MMW), are attractive for wireless communication and sensing systems due to their small chip size and facilitation in system-on-chip integration. One of the most important RFICs is the low-noise amplifier (LNA). The design of CMOS/BiCMOS wideband LNAs at MMW frequencies, especially those working across several decades of frequency, is challenging due to various issues. For instance, the device parasitic and inter-coupling between nearby elements in highly condensed chip areas limits the operating bandwidth and performance, and the conductive silicon substrates lead to the inevitable low quality factor of passive elements. In this work, a MMW BiCMOS ultra-wideband LNA across 20 to 57 GHz is presented along with the analysis, design and measurement results. To overcome the upper-band gain degradation and improve the in-band flatness, a novel frequency controlled positive-negative (P-N) feedback topology is adopted to modify the gain response by boosting the gain at the upper-band while suppressing that at the lower-band. To reduce overall power consumption, the first and second stages of the amplifier are stacked between supply voltage and DC ground to utilize the same DC current. At the output of amplifier, a shunt-peaking load stage is utilized to achieve wideband output matching. The designed ultra-wideband MMW LNA is fabricated in JAZZ 0.18-μm BiCMOS technology. It shows a measured power gain of 10.5 ± 0.5 dB, a noise figure between 5.1-7.0 dB, input and output return losses better than -10 and -15 dB, respectively, an input 1 dB compression point higher than -19 dBm, and an input third-order intercept point greater than -8 dBm. It dissipates 16.6 mW from 1.8 V DC supply and has a chip area of 700×400 μm^2

A 0.18-μm BICMOS 20-57 GHz Ultra-Wideband Low-Noise Amplifier Utilizing Frequency-Controlled Positive-Negative Feedback Technique

Silicon based complementary metallic oxide semiconductor (CMOS) and Bipolar Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (BiCMOS) radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs), including microwave and millimeter-wave (MMW), are attractive for wireless communication and sensing systems due to their small chip size and facilitation in system-on-chip integration. One of the most important RFICs is the low-noise amplifier (LNA). The design of CMOS/BiCMOS wideband LNAs at MMW frequencies, especially those working across several decades of frequency, is challenging due to various issues. For instance, the device parasitic and inter-coupling between nearby elements in highly condensed chip areas limits the operating bandwidth and performance, and the conductive silicon substrates lead to the inevitable low quality factor of passive elements. In this work, a MMW BiCMOS ultra-wideband LNA across 20 to 57 GHz is presented along with the analysis, design and measurement results. To overcome the upper-band gain degradation and improve the in-band flatness, a novel frequency controlled positive-negative (P-N) feedback topology is adopted to modify the gain response by boosting the gain at the upper-band while suppressing that at the lower-band. To reduce overall power consumption, the first and second stages of the amplifier are stacked between supply voltage and DC ground to utilize the same DC current. At the output of amplifier, a shunt-peaking load stage is utilized to achieve wideband output matching. The designed ultra-wideband MMW LNA is fabricated in JAZZ 0.18-μm BiCMOS technology. It shows a measured power gain of 10.5 ± 0.5 dB, a noise figure between 5.1-7.0 dB, input and output return losses better than -10 and -15 dB, respectively, an input 1 dB compression point higher than -19 dBm, and an input third-order intercept point greater than -8 dBm. It dissipates 16.6 mW from 1.8 V DC supply and has a chip area of 700×400 μm^2

Passive Mixer-based UWB Receiver with Low Loss, High Linearity and Noise-cancelling for Medical Applications

A double balanced passive mixer-based receiver operating in the 3-5 GHz UWB for medical applications is described in this paper. The receiver front-end circuit is composed of an inductorless low noise amplifier (LNA) followed by a fully differential voltage-driven double-balanced passive mixer. A duty cycle of 25% was chosen to eliminate overlap between LO signals, thereby improving receiver linearity. The LNA realizes a gain of 25.3 dB and a noise figure of 2.9 dB. The proposed receiver achieves an IIP3 of 3.14 dBm, an IIP2 of 17.5 dBm and an input return loss (S11) below -12.5dB. Designed in 0.18μm CMOS technology, the proposed mixer consumes 0.72pW from a 1.8V power supply. The designed receiver demonstrated a good ports isolation performance with LO_IF isolation of 60dB and RF_IF isolation of 78dB

A Millimeter-Wave Coexistent RFIC Receiver Architecture in 0.18-µm SiGe BiCMOS for Radar and Communication Systems

Innovative circuit architectures and techniques to enhance the performance of several key BiCMOS RFIC building blocks applied in radar and wireless communication systems operating at the millimeter-wave frequencies are addressed in this dissertation. The former encapsulates the development of an advanced, low-cost and miniature millimeter-wave coexistent current mode direct conversion receiver for short-range, high-resolution radar and high data rate communication systems. A new class of broadband low power consumption active balun-LNA consisting of two common emitters amplifiers mutually coupled thru an AC stacked transformer for power saving and gain boosting. The active balun-LNA exhibits new high linearity technique using a constant gm cell transconductance independent of input-outputs variations based on equal emitters’ area ratios. A novel multi-stages active balun-LNA with innovative technique to mitigate amplitude and phase imbalances is proposed. The new multi-stages balun-LNA technique consists of distributed feed-forward averaging recycles correction for amplitude and phase errors and is insensitive to unequal paths parasitic from input to outputs. The distributed averaging recycles correction technique resolves the amplitude and phase errors residuals in a multi-iterative process. The new multi-stages balun-LNA averaging correction technique is frequency independent and can perform amplitude and phase calibrations without relying on passive lumped elements for compensation. The multi-stage balun-LNA exhibits excellent performance from 10 to 50 GHz with amplitude and phase mismatches less than 0.7 dB and 2.86º, respectively. Furthermore, the new multi-stages balun-LNA operates in current mode and shows high linearity with low power consumption. The unique balun-LNA design can operates well into mm-wave regions and is an integral block of the mm-wave radar and communication systems. The integration of several RFIC blocks constitutes the broadband millimeter-wave coexistent current mode direct conversion receiver architecture operating from 22- 44 GHz. The system and architectural level analysis provide a unique understanding into the receiver characteristics and design trade-offs. The RF front-end is based on the broadband multi-stages active balun-LNA coupled into a fully balanced passive mixer with an all-pass in-phase/quadrature phase generator. The trans-impedance amplifier converts the input signal current into a voltage gain at the outputs. Simultaneously, the high power input signal current is channelized into an anti-aliasing filter with 20 dB rejection for out of band interferers. In addition, the dissertation demonstrates a wide dynamic range system with small die area, cost effective and very low power consumption

A Millimeter-Wave Coexistent RFIC Receiver Architecture in 0.18-µm SiGe BiCMOS for Radar and Communication Systems

Innovative circuit architectures and techniques to enhance the performance of several key BiCMOS RFIC building blocks applied in radar and wireless communication systems operating at the millimeter-wave frequencies are addressed in this dissertation. The former encapsulates the development of an advanced, low-cost and miniature millimeter-wave coexistent current mode direct conversion receiver for short-range, high-resolution radar and high data rate communication systems. A new class of broadband low power consumption active balun-LNA consisting of two common emitters amplifiers mutually coupled thru an AC stacked transformer for power saving and gain boosting. The active balun-LNA exhibits new high linearity technique using a constant gm cell transconductance independent of input-outputs variations based on equal emitters’ area ratios. A novel multi-stages active balun-LNA with innovative technique to mitigate amplitude and phase imbalances is proposed. The new multi-stages balun-LNA technique consists of distributed feed-forward averaging recycles correction for amplitude and phase errors and is insensitive to unequal paths parasitic from input to outputs. The distributed averaging recycles correction technique resolves the amplitude and phase errors residuals in a multi-iterative process. The new multi-stages balun-LNA averaging correction technique is frequency independent and can perform amplitude and phase calibrations without relying on passive lumped elements for compensation. The multi-stage balun-LNA exhibits excellent performance from 10 to 50 GHz with amplitude and phase mismatches less than 0.7 dB and 2.86º, respectively. Furthermore, the new multi-stages balun-LNA operates in current mode and shows high linearity with low power consumption. The unique balun-LNA design can operates well into mm-wave regions and is an integral block of the mm-wave radar and communication systems. The integration of several RFIC blocks constitutes the broadband millimeter-wave coexistent current mode direct conversion receiver architecture operating from 22- 44 GHz. The system and architectural level analysis provide a unique understanding into the receiver characteristics and design trade-offs. The RF front-end is based on the broadband multi-stages active balun-LNA coupled into a fully balanced passive mixer with an all-pass in-phase/quadrature phase generator. The trans-impedance amplifier converts the input signal current into a voltage gain at the outputs. Simultaneously, the high power input signal current is channelized into an anti-aliasing filter with 20 dB rejection for out of band interferers. In addition, the dissertation demonstrates a wide dynamic range system with small die area, cost effective and very low power consumption

Wideband integrated circuits for optical communication systems

The exponential growth of internet traffic drives datacenters to constantly improvetheir capacity. Several research and industrial organizations are aiming towardsTbps Ethernet and beyond, which brings new challenges to the field of high-speedbroadband electronic circuit design. With datacenters rapidly becoming significantenergy consumers on the global scale, the energy efficiency of the optical interconnecttransceivers takes a primary role in the development of novel systems. Furthermore,wideband optical links are finding application inside very high throughput satellite(V/HTS) payloads used in the ever-expanding cloud of telecommunication satellites,enabled by the maturity of the existing fiber based optical links and the hightechnology readiness level of radiation hardened integrated circuit processes. Thereare several additional challenges unique in the design of a wideband optical system.The overall system noise must be optimized for the specific application, modulationscheme, PD and laser characteristics. Most state-of-the-art wideband circuits are builton high-end semiconductor SiGe and InP technologies. However, each technologydemands specific design decisions to be made in order to get low noise, high energyefficiency and adequate bandwidth. In order to overcome the frequency limitationsof the optoelectronic components, bandwidth enhancement and channel equalizationtechniques are used. In this work various blocks of optical communication systems aredesigned attempting to tackle some of the aforementioned challenges. Two TIA front-end topologies with 133 GHz bandwidth, a CB and a CE with shunt-shunt feedback,are designed and measured, utilizing a state-of-the-art 130 nm InP DHBT technology.A modular equalizer block built in 130 nm SiGe HBT technology is presented. Threeultra-wideband traveling wave amplifiers, a 4-cell, a single cell and a matrix single-stage, are designed in a 250 nm InP DHBT process to test the limits of distributedamplification. A differential VCSEL driver circuit is designed and integrated in a4x 28 Gbps transceiver system for intra-satellite optical communications based in arad-hard 130nm SiGe process

A dual-mode Q-enhanced RF front-end filter for 5 GHz WLAN and UWB with NB interference rejection

The 5 GHz Wireless LAN (802.11a) is a popular standard for wireless indoor communications providing moderate range and speed. Combined with the emerging ultra Wideband standard (UWB) for short range and high speed communications, the two standards promise to fulfil all areas of wireless application needs. However, due to the overlapping of the two spectrums, the stronger 802.11a signals tend to interfere causing degradation to the UWB receiver. This presents one of the main technical challenges preventing the wide acceptance of UWB. The research work presented in this thesis is to propose a low cost RF receiver front-end filter topology that would resolve the narrowband (NB) interference to UWB receiver while being operable in both 802.11a mode and UWB mode. The goal of the dual mode filter design is to reduce cost and complexity by developing a fully integrated front-end filter. The filter design utilizes high Q passive devices and Q-enhancement technique to provide front-end channel-selection in NB mode and NB interference rejection in UWB mode. In the 802.11a NB mode, the filter has a tunable gain of 4 dB to 25 dB, NF of 8 dB and an IIP3 between -47 dBm and -18 dBm. The input impedance is matched at -16 dB. The frequency of operation can be tuned from 5.15 GHz to 5.35 GHz. In the UWB mode, the filter has a gain of 0 dB to 8 dB across 3.1 GHz to 9 GHz. The filter can reject the NB interference between 5.15 GHz to 5.35 GHz at up to 60 dB. The Q of the filter is tunable up to a 250 while consuming a maximum of 23.4 mW of power. The fully integrated dual mode filter occupies a die area of 1.1 mm2