300 research outputs found
High Performance Integrated Circuit Blocks for High-IF Wideband Receivers
Due to the demand for highâperformance radio frequency (RF) integrated circuit
design in the past years, a systemâonâchip (SoC) that enables integration of analog and
digital parts on the same die has become the trend of the microelectronics industry. As
a result, a major requirement of the next generation of wireless devices is to support
multiple standards in the same chipâset. This would enable a single device to support
multiple peripheral applications and services.
Based on the aforementioned, the traditional superheterodyne frontâend
architecture is not suitable for such applications as it would require a complete receiver
for each standard to be supported. A more attractive alternative is the highintermediate
frequency (IF) radio architecture. In this case the signal is digitalized at an
intermediate frequency such as 200MHz. As a consequence, the baseband operations,
such as downâconversion and channel filtering, become more power and area efficient
in the digital domain. Such architecture releases the specifications for most of the frontâend building blocks, but the linearity and dynamic range of the ADC become the
bottlenecks in this system. The requirements of large bandwidth, high frequency and
enough resolution make such ADC very difficult to realize. Many ADC architectures
were analyzed and ContinuousâTime Bandpass SigmaâDelta (CTâBPâÎŁÎ) architecture was
found to be the most suitable solution in the highâIF receiver architecture since they
combine oversampling and noise shaping to get fairly high resolution in a limited
bandwidth.
A major issue in continuousâtime networks is the lack of accuracy due to powervoltageâ
temperature (PVT) tolerances that lead to over 20% pole variations compared
to their discreteâtime counterparts. An optimally tuned BP ÎŁÎ ADC requires correcting
for center frequency deviations, excess loop delay, and DAC coefficients. Due to these
undesirable effects, a calibration algorithm is necessary to compensate for these
variations in order to achieve high SNR requirements as technology shrinks.
In this work, a novel linearization technique for a Wideband LowâNoise
Amplifier (LNA) targeted for a frequency range of 3â7GHz is presented. Postâlayout
simulations show NF of 6.3dB, peak S21 of 6.1dB, and peak IIP3 of 21.3dBm,
respectively. The power consumption of the LNA is 5.8mA from 2V.
Secondly, the design of a CMOS 6th order CT BPâÎŁÎ modulator running at 800
MHz for HighâIF conversion of 10MHz bandwidth signals at 200 MHz is presented. A
novel transconductance amplifier has been developed to achieve high linearity and high
dynamic range at high frequencies. A 2âbit quantizer with offset cancellation is alsopresented. The sixthâorder modulator is implemented using 0.18 um TSMC standard
analog CMOS technology. Postâlayout simulations in cadence demonstrate that the
modulator achieves a SNDR of 78 dB (~13 bit) performance over a 14MHz bandwidth.
The modulatorâs static power consumption is 107mW from a supply power of ± 0.9V.
Finally, a calibration technique for the optimization of the Noise Transfer
Function CT BP ÎŁÎ modulators is presented. The proposed technique employs two test
tones applied at the input of the quantizer to evaluate the noise transfer function of
the ADC, using the capabilities of the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) platform usually
available in mixedâmode systems. Once the ADC output bit stream is captured,
necessary information to generate the control signals to tune the ADC parameters for
best SignalâtoâQuantization Noise Ratio (SQNR) performance is extracted via Leastâ
Mean Squared (LMS) softwareâbased algorithm. Since the two tones are located
outside the band of interest, the proposed global calibration approach can be used
online with no significant effect on the inâband content
A very high speed bandpass continous time sigma delta modulator for RF receiver front end A/D conversion
Master'sMASTER OF ENGINEERIN
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
Design of a wideband low-power continuous-time sigma-delta (ÎŁÎ) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in 90nm CMOS technology
The growing trend in VLSI systems is to shift more signal processing functionality from analog to digital domain to reduce manufacturing cost and improve reliability. It has resulted in the demand for wideband high-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). There are many different techniques for doing analog-to-digital conversions. Oversampling ADC based on sigma-delta (ÎŁÎ) modulation is receiving a lot of attention due to its significantly relaxed matching requirements on analog components. Moreover, it does not need a steep roll-off anti-aliasing filter. A ÎŁÎ ADC can be implemented either as a discrete time system or a continuous time one. Nowadays growing interest is focused on the continuous-time ÎŁÎ ADC for its use in the wideband and low-power applications, such as medical imaging, portable ultrasound systems, wireless receivers, and test equipments. A continuous-time ÎŁÎ ADC offers some important advantages over its discrete-time counterpart, including higher sampling frequency, intrinsic anti-alias filtering, much relaxed sampling network requirements, and low-voltage implementation. Especially it has the potential in achieving low power consumption.
This dissertation presents a novel fifth-order continuous-time ÎŁÎ ADC which is implemented in a 90nm CMOS technology with single 1.0-V power supply. To speed up design process, an improved direct design method is proposed and used to design the loop filter transfer function. To maximize the in-band gain provided by the loop filter, thus maximizing in-band noise suppression, the excess loop delay must be kept minimum. In this design, a very low latency 4-bit flash quantizer with digital-to-analog (DAC) trimming is utilized. DAC trimming technique is used to correct the quantizer offset error, which allows minimum-sized transistors to be used for fast and low-power operation. The modulator has sampling clock of 800MHz. It achieves a dynamic range (DR) of 75dB and a signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio (SNDR) of 70dB over 25MHz input signal bandwidth with 16.4mW power dissipation. Our work is among the most improved published to date. It uses the lowest supply voltage and has the highest input signal bandwidth while dissipating the lowest power among the bandwidths exceeding 15MHz
- âŠ