A Fully-Integrated Reconfigurable Dual-Band Transceiver for Short Range Wireless Communications in 180 nm CMOS

© 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, 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 components of this work in other works.A fully-integrated reconfigurable dual-band (760-960 MHz and 2.4-2.5 GHz) transceiver (TRX) for short range wireless communications is presented. The TRX consists of two individually-optimized RF front-ends for each band and one shared power-scalable analog baseband. The sub-GHz receiver has achieved the maximum 75 dBc 3rd-order harmonic rejection ratio (HRR3) by inserting a Q-enhanced notch filtering RF amplifier (RFA). In 2.4 GHz band, a single-ended-to-differential RFA with gain/phase imbalance compensation is proposed in the receiver. A ΣΔ fractional-N PLL frequency synthesizer with two switchable Class-C VCOs is employed to provide the LOs. Moreover, the integrated multi-mode PAs achieve the output P1dB (OP1dB) of 16.3 dBm and 14.1 dBm with both 25% PAE for sub-GHz and 2.4 GHz bands, respectively. A power-control loop is proposed to detect the input signal PAPR in real-time and flexibly reconfigure the PA's operation modes to enhance the back-off efficiency. With this proposed technique, the PAE of the sub-GHz PA is improved by x3.24 and x1.41 at 9 dB and 3 dB back-off powers, respectively, and the PAE of the 2.4 GHz PA is improved by x2.17 at 6 dB back-off power. The presented transceiver has achieved comparable or even better performance in terms of noise figure, HRR, OP1dB and power efficiency compared with the state-of-the-art.Peer reviewe

Innovative Techniques for 60-GHz On-Chip Antennas on CMOS Substrate

The 60-GHz band has a 7-GHz of bandwidth enabling high data rate wireless communication. Also, it has a short wavelength allowing for passive devices integration into a chip, that is, fully integrated system-on-chip (SOC) is possible. This chapter features the design, implementation, and measurements of 60-GHz on-chip antennas (OCAs) on complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology. OCAs are the primary barrier for the SOC solution due to their limited performance. This degraded performance comes from the low resistivity and the high permittivity of the CMOS substrate. We present here two innovative techniques to improve the CMOS OCAs’ performance. The first method utilizes artificial magnetic conductors to shield the OCA electromagnetically from the CMOS substrate. The second methodology employs the PN-junction properties to create a high resistivity layer. Both approaches target the mitigation of the losses of the CMOS substrate; hence, the radiation performance characteristics of the OCAs are enhanced

Gain Enhancement of On-Chip Wireless interconnects at 60 GHz Using an Artificial Magnetic Conductor

The motivation for this work comes from the increased demand for short range high frequency data communication within and between integrated circuit (IC) chips. The use of wireless interconnects introduces flexibility to the circuit design, reduces power consumption and production costs, since the antennas can be integrated into a standard CMOS process. These findings have been well noted in literature. In addition, wireless interconnects operating in the mm-wave frequency range, at 60GHz, allow for a high data rate of over 1Gb/s for short range of transmissions. The drawback of wireless interconnects operating at high frequencies is the distortion in the radiation pattern caused by the silicon substrate inherent in a standard CMOS process. The high permittivity and a low resistivity of silicon in a CMOS process introduce radiation losses. These losses distort the radiating signal, reducing the directive gain and the antenna efficiency. The objective of the work is to enhance antenna gain and improve the radiation efficiency with the use of a Jerusalem-Cross Artificial Magnetic Conductor (AMC). The Jerusalem Cross AMC can mitigate the effects of the silicon and improve data transmission for inter-Chip data communications. A Yagi antenna was optimized for end-fire radiation in the plane of the chip. It’s performance was studied when it was placed in the center and along the front edge of a standard 10mm by 10mm chip, with the AMC layer extending only below the feed system, Partial AMC, and then compared when it extends under the entire antenna, Full AMC. To examine the transmission characteristics two chips were placed facing one another, on an FR4 slab, with the antennas first placed at the front edges of both chips then in the center of their respective chips. For direct comparison a third configuration was made with one antenna in the center of a chip and the other at the edge of the second chip. The performance of this inter-chip transmission was examined with the three AMC layer configurations: No AMC, Partial AMC, and Full AMC. All simulations were performed using ANSYS HFSS. The results show that the partial AMC improves the performance of the Yagi antenna when it was placed at the front edge of the chip facing out. The directive gain (Endfire direction) with the partial AMC was increased by 0.79 dB or 46% when compared to the antenna without an AMC. The radiation efficiency increased from 39% to 45%. When examining the antenna in the center of the larger substrate the full AMC layer improved performance. The directive gain increased by 0.93 dB or 5%. The full AMC layer improved the directional gain of the antenna in the center of the chip because it is more susceptible to the effects of the silicon substrate. Whereas when placed at the edge of the chip the antenna is mainly radiating in free space and not as influenced by the losses due to the silicon. Which is why the partial AMC improves radiation performance for the antenna placed at the edge of the chip. This is more clearly shown by the transmission results. When both antennas were placed at the front edges of their respective chips with full AMC layers the gain increased by 11% and the radiation efficiency increases by 12%; while when both antennas are placed in the center the directive gain increases by 26% and the radiation efficiency increases by only 2%. In the model with one antenna at the front edge of the first chip and the other antenna in the center of the second chip the full AMC improved the directive gain by 12% and 29% respectively. Both results show that the full AMC has a positive effect on the directive gain of the antenna, especially when placed in the center of the substrate

Ball Grid Array Module with Integrated Shaped Lens for 5G Backhaul/Fronthaul Communications in F-Band

In this paper, we propose a ball grid array (BGA) module with an integrated 3-D-printed plastic lens antenna for application in a dedicated 130 GHz OOK transceiver that targets the area of 5G backhaul/fronthaul systems. The main design goal was the full integration of a small footprint antenna with an energy-efficient transceiver. The antenna system must be compact and cost effective while delivering an approximately 30 dBi gain in the working band, defined as 120 to 140 GHz. Accordingly, a 2×2 array of aperture-coupled patch antennas was designed in the 7×7×0.362 mm3 BGA module as the feed antenna of the lens. This achieved a 7.8 dBi realized gain, broadside polarization purity above 20 dB, and over 55% total efficiency from 110 to 140 GHz (20% bandwidth). A plastic elliptical lens 40 mm in diameter and 42.3 mm in height was placed on top of the BGA module. The antenna achieved a return loss better than ?10 dB and a 28 dBi realized gain from 114 to 140 GHz. Finally, active measurements demonstrated a >12 Gbps Tx/Rx link at 5 m with bit error rate (BER) < 10?6 at 1.6 pJ/b/m. These results pave the way for future cost-effective, energy-efficient, high-data rate backhaul/fronthaul systems for 5G communications.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio