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

Circuits and Systems for On-Chip RF Chemical Sensors and RF FDD Duplexers

Integrating RF bio-chemical sensors and RF duplexers helps to reduce cost and area in the current applications. Furthermore, new applications can exist based on the large scale integration of these crucial blocks. This dissertation addresses the integration of RF bio-chemical sensors and RF duplexers by proposing these initiatives. A low power integrated LC-oscillator-based broadband dielectric spectroscopy (BDS) system is presented. The real relative permittivity ε’r is measured as a shift in the oscillator frequency using an on-chip frequency-to-digital converter (FDC). The imaginary relative permittivity ε”r increases the losses of the oscillator tank which mandates a higher dc biasing current to preserve the same oscillation amplitude. An amplitude-locked loop (ALL) is used to fix the amplitude and linearize the relation between the oscillator bias current and ε”r. The proposed BDS system employs a sensing oscillator and a reference oscillator where correlated double sampling (CDS) is used to mitigate the impact of flicker noise, temperature variations and frequency drifts. A prototype is implemented in 0.18 µm CMOS process with total chip area of 6.24 mm^2 to operate in 1-6 GHz range using three dual bands LC oscillators. The achieved standard deviation in the air is 2.1 ppm for frequency reading and 110 ppm for current reading. A tunable integrated electrical balanced duplexer (EBD) is presented as a compact alternative to multiple bulky SAW and BAW duplexers in 3G/4G cellular transceivers. A balancing network creates a replica of the transmitter signal for cancellation at the input of a single-ended low noise amplifier (LNA) to isolate the receive path from the transmitter. The proposed passive EBD is based on a cross-connected transformer topology without the need of any extra balun at the antenna side. The duplexer achieves around 50 dB TX-RX isolation within 1.6-2.2 GHz range up to 22 dBm. The cascaded noise figure of the duplexer and LNA is 6.5 dB, and TX insertion loss (TXIL) of the duplexer is about 3.2 dB. The duplexer and LNA are implemented in 0.18 µm CMOS process and occupy an active area of 0.35 mm^2

Ka-band full duplex system with electrical balance duplexer for 5G applications using SiGe BiCMOS technology

The current dominating communication system is 4G. However, with the increase in the data rate and in the number of users in the world, the 4G communication system has started to saturate and couldn’t manage to keep up with user demands and there is less room for progress at 4G systems. In search of finding a system that covers the future interests of users, a new communication scheme is being processed as 5G. The next generation systems require wider bandwidth, high spectral efficiency, and less latency. For these goals, designs with higher frequency and full-duplex operation mode have been started to gain attention. Developments in SiGe HBT technologies -higher fT and fmax- make them suitable for these challenges. Considering these trends which lead to the future of communication systems, in this thesis the design of Ka-band (25-32GHz) SiGe full duplex system with electrical balance duplexer for 5G applications is presented. This system is created by integrating. a duplexer, an LNA, and a PA. The electrical balance duplexer is realized by a hybrid transformer and a balancing network. The impedance of the antenna is mimicked by tuning the balancing network to provide high isolation between transmitter and receiver blocks. All the ports have better than 10dB return loss. Duplexer provides measured 39dB peak isolation at 28GHz, with 3.8dB insertion loss from the transmitter to the antenna and 4.7dB insertion loss from the antenna to receiver. The LNA achieves the measured gain of 15dB, NF of 3.5dB and OP1dB of 13.5dBm at 28GHz by including an input and an output BALUN transformer. The PA provides measured gain of 17dB and OP1dB of 14dBm at 28GH

Architectures, Antennas and Circuits for Millimeter-wave Wireless Full-Duplex Applications

Demand for wireless network capacity keeps growing exponentially every year, as a result a 1000-fold increase in data traffic is projected over the next 10 years in the context of 5G wireless networks. Solutions for delivering the 1000-fold increase in capacity fall into three main categories: deploying smaller cells, allocating more spectrum and improving spectral efficiency of wireless systems. Smaller cells at RF frequencies (1-6GHz) are unlikely to deliver the demanded capacity increase. On the other hand, millimeter-wave spectrum (frequencies over 24GHz) offers wider, multi-GHz channel bandwidths, and therefore has gained significant research interest as one of the most promising solutions to address the data traffic demands of 5G. Another disruptive technology is full-duplex which breaks a century-old assumption in wireless communication, by simultaneous transmission and reception on the same frequency channel. In doing so, full-duplex offers many benefits for wireless networks, including an immediate spectral efficiency improvement in the physical layer. Although FD promises great benefits, self-interference from the transmitter to its own receiver poses a fundamental challenge. The self-interference can be more than a billion times stronger than the desired signal and must be suppressed below the receiver noise floor. In recent years, there has been some research efforts on fully-integrated full-duplex RF transceivers, but mm-wave fully-integrated full-duplex systems, are still in their infancy. This dissertation presents novel architectures, antenna and circuit techniques to merge two exciting technologies, mm-wave and full-duplex, which can potentially offer the dual benefits of wide bandwidths and improved spectral efficiency. To this end, two different antenna interfaces, namely a wideband reconfigurable T/R antenna pair with polarization-based antenna cancellation and an mm-wave fully-integrated magnetic-free non-reciprocal circulator, are presented. The polarization-based antenna cancellation is employed in conjunction with the RF and digital cancellation to design a 60GHz full-duplex 45nm SOI CMOS transceiver with nearly 80dB self-interference suppression. The concepts and prototypes presented in this dissertation have also profound implications for emerging applications such as vehicular radars, 5G small-cell base-stations and virtual reality

Efficient, High power Precision RF and mmWave Digital Transmitter Architectures

Digital transmitters offer several advantages over conventional analog transmitters such as reconfigurability, elimination of scaling-unfriendly, power hungry and bulky analog blocks and portability across technology. The rapid advancement of technology in CMOS processes also enables integration of complex digital signal processing circuitry on the same die as the digital transmitter to compensate for their non-idealities. The use of this digital assistance can, for instance, enable the use of highly efficient but nonlinear switching-class power amplifiers by compensating for their severe nonlinearity through digital predistortion. While this shift to digitally intensive transmitter architectures is propelled by the benefits stated above, several pressing challenges arise that vary in their nature depending on the frequency of operation - from RF to mmWave. Millimeter wave CMOS power amplifiers have traditionally been limited in output power due to the low breakdown voltage of scaled CMOS technologies and poor quality of on-chip passives. Moreover, high data-rates and efficient spectrum utilization demand highly linear power amplifiers with high efficiency under back-off. However, linearity and high efficiency are traditionally at odds with each other in conventional power amplifier design. In this dissertation, digital assistance is used to relax this trade-off and enable the use of state-of-the-art switching class power amplifiers. A novel digital transmitter architecture which simultaneously employs aggressive device-stacking and large-scale power combining for watt-class output power, dynamic load modulation for linearization, and improved efficiency under back-off by supply-switching and load modulation is presented. At RF frequencies, while the problem of watt-class power amplification has been long solved, more pressing challenges arise from the crowded spectrum in this regime. A major drawback of digital transmitters is the absence of a reconstruction filter after digital-to-analog conversion which causes the baseband quantization noise to get upconverted to RF and amplified at the output of the transmitter. In high power transmitters, this upconverted noise can be so strong as to prevent their use in FDD systems due to receiver desensitization or impose stringent coexistence challenges. In this dissertation, new quantization noise suppression techniques are presented which, for the first time, contribute toward making watt-class fully-integrated digital RF transmitters a viable alternative for FDD and coexistence scenarios. Specifically, the techniques involve embedding a mixed-domain multi-tap FIR filter within highly-efficient watt-class switching power amplifiers to suppress quantization noise, enhancing the bandwidth of noise suppression, enabling tunable location of suppression and overcoming the limitations of purely digital-domain filtering techniques for quantization noise

Full Duplex CMOS Transceiver with On-Chip Self-Interference Cancelation

abstract: The demand for the higher data rate in the wireless telecommunication is increasing rapidly. Providing higher data rate in cellular telecommunication systems is limited because of the limited physical resources such as telecommunication frequency channels. Besides, interference with the other users and self-interference signal in the receiver are the other challenges in increasing the bandwidth of the wireless telecommunication system. Full duplex wireless communication transmits and receives at the same time and the same frequency which was assumed impossible in the conventional wireless communication systems. Full duplex wireless communication, compared to the conventional wireless communication, doubles the channel efficiency and bandwidth. In addition, full duplex wireless communication system simplifies the reusing of the radio resources in small cells to eliminate the backhaul problem and simplifies the management of the spectrum. Finally, the full duplex telecommunication system reduces the costs of future wireless communication systems. The main challenge in the full duplex wireless is the self-interference signal at the receiver which is very large compared to the receiver noise floor and it degrades the receiver performance significantly. In this dissertation, different techniques for the antenna interface and self-interference cancellation are proposed for the wireless full duplex transceiver. These techniques are designed and implemented on CMOS technology. The measurement results show that the full duplex wireless is possible for the short range and cellular wireless communication systems.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Engineering 201

IC-Antenna Co-Integration for Efficient and Scalable Millimeter-Wave Antenna Interfaces

Millimeter-wave (mm-wave) technology promises high speed, high system capacity and low latency interconnects with reduced cost. Applications like high data-rate wireless links, next generation automotive sensors and security body scanners highly depend on mm-wave technology innovations. As operating frequency moves to higher mm-wave bands, shrinking antenna dimensions enable co-integration of IC and antenna. Limited transistor output power at mm-wave requires multi-element arrays to satisfy communication and radar link budgets. This dissertation presents a wafer-scale compatible IC-antenna co-integration for efficient and scalable mm-wave antenna interfaces. The proposed IC-antenna co-integration approach is demonstrated through single antenna transmitters, a concurrent dual-polarization receiver front-end and polarization-duplex transmitter/receiver front-end. Chapter 2 discusses the challenge of mm-wave IC-antenna interfaces with prior art including antenna-in-package (AiP) and on-chip antennas. The 60 GHz efficient, scalable and wafer-scale compatible IC-antenna co-integration approach is presented demonstrating wide bandwidth and large efficiency which are comparable to system-level AiP techniques at a lower cost and fabrication complexity. Chapter 3 extends the proposed approach to a concurrent 60 GHz dual-polarization receiver front-end for short-range imaging/communication applications and polarization diversity based MIMO links. Active cancellation between orthogonal polarizations is adopted to achieve ∼ 30 dB cross-polarization leakage cancellation and concurrent dual-pol reception. Chapter 4 presents a 60 GHz simultaneous transmit and receive front-end to achieve efficient polarization-duplex operation based on dual-polarization IC-antenna co-integration. Transmitter leakage is suppressed at receiver input and output by intrinsic antenna isolation and a feed-forward passive canceller. Total average self-interference cancellation >40 dB is achieved for 1.07 GHz RF bandwidth at 60 GHz in the presence of a reflector

Integrated Filtering Antennas for Wireless Communications

In traditional radio frequency (RF) front-end subsystems, the passive components, such as antennas, filters, power dividers and duplexers, are separately designed and cascaded via the 50 ? interfaces. This traditional approach results in a bulky and heavy RF front-end subsystem, and suffers from compromised efficiency due to the losses in the interconnections and the mismatching problems between different components. The frequency responses of the antennas such as the frequency selectivity and bandwidth are usually degraded, especially for microstrip antennas. To improve the frequency responses and reduce the size of RF front ends, it is important to investigate novel highly integrated antennas which exhibit multiple functions such as radiation, filtering, power dividing and combining or duplexing, simultaneously. In this thesis, several innovative designs of compact, multi-functional integrated an-tennas/arrays are proposed for wireless communication applications. First, new methods of designing integrated filtering antenna elements with broadband or dual-band performance are investigated. These antennas also feature high frequency selectivity and wideband harmonic suppression. Based on these studies, several integrated filtering array antennas with improved gains and frequency responses are developed for the first time. Compared with traditional array antennas, these proposed antennas exhibit improved bandwidths, out-of-band rejection and wideband harmonic suppression. The application of the filtering antennas in millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) frequency band is also investigated as it can potentially reduce the cost of the mm-Wave front-end subsystems significantly while providing the improved impedance bandwidth. The integrated design techniques are further developed to design novel dual-port highly integrated antennas with filtering and duplexing functions integrated. Such a new concept and the prototypes could find poten-tial applications in wireless communication systems and intelligent transportation system (ITS). In this thesis, comprehensive design methodologies and synthesis methods are provid-ed to guide the design of the integrated filtering antennas. The performance is evaluated with the help of full-wave electromagnetics (EM) simulations. All of the prototypes are fabricated and tested for validating the design concepts. Good agreement between the simulation and measurement results is achieved, demonstrating the integrated antennas have the advantages of compact size, flat gain performance, low losses and excellent harmonic suppression performance. These researches are important for modern wireless communication systems

Microstrip Array Antenna using Series-Corporate Feed for Navigation System

In this paper, the proposed antenna consists of a single transmission line for 6-elements microstrip array antenna using Rogers RT5880 substrate material with a dielectric constant (εr) of 2.2 and thickness of 0.787 mm for navigation applications. The array structures of unequal patches placement are proposed with corporate feed line and H-shaped configurations are employed on the substrate and used the microstrip feed line with a corporate feed network excited via 50 Ω with T-junction method to control the feed for each group. 6-elements microstrip array antenna has operated at the resonant frequency of 1.27 GHz was obtained between the frequency from 1.2663 GHz to 1.2734 GHz where the S11-parameters of the structure designed and simulation below than <-10 dB. The analysis shows the antenna gain has increased 72.6% with high directivity as compared to single elements microstrip antenna. The radiation characteristics and other array parameters are evaluated with respect to the application requirements. However, circular polarization has obtained in 6-elements array antenna as the axial ratio is successfully achieved below than -3dB. The antenna efficiency, the current distribution, VSWR, and S11-parameters of the proposed 6-elements CP microstrip array antenna have been presented and discussed in detail. The design methodology and the measurement results have been presented and discussed in this paper