CMOS radio front-end circuit blocks for millimeter-wave communications and atmospheric remote sensing receivers

This thesis focuses on integrated circuits operating at millimeter-wave frequencies in CMOS technologies. More explicitly, the dissertation concentrates on the design and characterization of mm-wave monolithic active and passive components, the low-noise amplifier (LNA), the amplifier beyond cut-off frequency, the resistive mixer, the Gilbert-cell mixer, the sub-harmonic mixer, and the receiver front-end for earth remote sensing applications. The applications for these circuits vary from E-band high-speed communication to atmospheric remote sensing at 183 GHz and also for 300 GHz spectroscopy. This dissertation presents research contributions in the form of nine scientific publications and an overview of the research topic, which also summarizes the principal results of the work. MMIC designs at mm-wave frequencies have a significant dependency on the accurate design of passives and active components. Therefore, an extensive study on designing various transmission lines and other critical passive components such as on-chip Lange couplers at 130 GHz and 180 GHz, transformers at 90 GHz and 130 GHz, spiral baluns at 90 GHz and 130 GHz, finger and plate capacitors, and RF probing pads are carried out. For active device modeling, the layout dependency on the transistor performance is investigated. In this work, a simple and computationally efficient modeling technique is proposed to characterize the coupled slow-wave coplanar waveguide (CS-CPW) structure which is valid for any silicon technology. A D-band LNA utilizing the CS-CPW as the matching elements, and a 3-dB quadrature coupler covering the whole E- to W-band using the CS-CPW structure are designed to verify the proposed modeling methodology of the CS-CPW. The LNA shows a gain from 135 GHz to 170 GHz and a noise figure of 8.5 dB, and the coupler occupies only 50% silicon area compared to the conventional Lange couplers. Many different mm-wave circuit blocks are also developed within the scope of this work. The S-CPW based amplifier illustrates gain from 124 to 184 GHz. The 0.325-THz CMOS amplifier shows a gain of 4.5 dB, and demonstrate the highest operation frequency for a silicon amplifier up to date. A compact 129-140 GHz Gilbert-cell mixer and 127-140 GHz image-rejection resistive mixer are realized for a 140-GHz transceiver. At 180 GHz, a compact subharmonic I/Q balanced resistive mixer together with two on-chip IF amplifiers are realized and show a conversion gain of +8 dB with a 20 dB IR ratio. Furthermore, in this thesis, a feasibility study for using the CMOS circuit blocks in designing the future light-weight, small-in-size atmospheric remote sensing receivers is performed. The performance of the designed CMOS down-converter MMIC demonstrates the potential of the CMOS technology for achieving the high-level of integration necessary for the small-sized atmospheric remote sensing receivers and small satellites

A Study of Different Switched Mode Power Amplifiers for the Burst Mode Operation

Power-amplifier efficiency is a significant issue for the overall efficiency of most wireless system. Therefore, currently there are different kind of Switched mode power amplifiers are developed which are showing very high efficiency also at higher frequencies but all of these amplifiers are subjected to drive with the constant envelope signals. Whereas, for the increasing demand of high data rate transmissions in wireless communication there are some new modulation schemes are introduced and which are generating no more a constant envelope signal but a high peak to average power signal. Therefore, recently a new technique is proposed called the burst mode operation for operating the switched mode power amplifiers efficiently while driven by a high peak to average power signal.   The purpose of this master thesis work was to review the theory of this burst mode operation and some basic investigations of this theory on switched mode power amplifiers were performed in simulation environments. The amplifiers of class D, inverse D, DE and J are studied. The thesis work was mainly carried out by ADS and partly in MATLAB SIMULINK environment. Since this burst mode operation is a completely new technique therefore a new Harmonic balance simulation setups in ADS and Microwave Office are developed to generate the RF burst signals.   A Class J amplifier based on LDMOS technique is measured by a 16 carrier multi-tone signal having peak to average power ratio of 7 dB and achieved the drain efficiency of 50% with -30 dBc linearity at 946 MHz.  

CMOS radio front-end circuit blocks for millimeter-wave communications and atmospheric remote sensing receivers:Dissertation

This thesis focuses on integrated circuits operating at millimeter-wave frequencies in CMOS technologies. More explicitly, the dissertation concentrates on the design and characterization of mm-wave monolithic active and passive components, the low-noise amplifier (LNA), the amplifier beyond cut-off frequency, the resistive mixer, the Gilbert-cell mixer, the sub-harmonic mixer, and the receiver front-end for earth remote sensing applications. The applications for these circuits vary from E-band high-speed communication to atmospheric remote sensing at 183 GHz and also for 300 GHz spectroscopy. This dissertation presents research contributions in the form of nine scientific publications and an overview of the research topic, which also summarizes the principal results of the work. MMIC designs at mm-wave frequencies have a significant dependency on the accurate design of passives and active components. Therefore, an extensive study on designing various transmission lines and other critical passive components such as on-chip Lange couplers at 130 GHz and 180 GHz, transformers at 90 GHz and 130 GHz, spiral baluns at 90 GHz and 130 GHz, finger and plate capacitors, and RF probing pads are carried out. For active device modeling, the layout dependency on the transistor performance is investigated. In this work, a simple and computationally efficient modeling technique is proposed to characterize the coupled slow-wave coplanar waveguide (CS-CPW) structure which is valid for any silicon technology. A D-band LNA utilizing the CS-CPW as the matching elements, and a 3-dB quadrature coupler covering the whole E- to W-band using the CS-CPW structure are designed to verify the proposed modeling methodology of the CS-CPW. The LNA shows a gain from 135 GHz to 170 GHz and a noise figure of 8.5 dB, and the coupler occupies only 50% silicon area compared to the conventional Lange couplers. Many different mm-wave circuit blocks are also developed within the scope of this work. The S-CPW based amplifier illustrates gain from 124 to 184 GHz. The 0.325-THz CMOS amplifier shows a gain of 4.5 dB, and demonstrate the highest operation frequency for a silicon amplifier up to date. A compact 129-140 GHz Gilbert-cell mixer and 127-140 GHz image-rejection resistive mixer are realized for a 140-GHz transceiver. At 180 GHz, a compact subharmonic I/Q balanced resistive mixer together with two on-chip IF amplifiers are realized and show a conversion gain of +8 dB with a 20 dB IR ratio. Furthermore, in this thesis, a feasibility study for using the CMOS circuit blocks in designing the future light-weight, small-in-size atmospheric remote sensing receivers is performed. The performance of the designed CMOS down-converter MMIC demonstrates the potential of the CMOS technology for achieving the high-level of integration necessary for the small-sized atmospheric remote sensing receivers and small satellites

Wideband mm-Wave CMOS Slow Wave Coupler

In this letter, we have presented a design of on-chip millimeter-wave 3-dB quadrature coupler that utilizes the coupled slow wave coplanar waveguide. The designed CMOS coupler covers the whole E- and W-band and occupies a silicon area of only 0.0115 mm 2 , which is significantly smaller compared to the conventional microstrip-line-based Lange couplers. Measurement of the quadrature coupler shows a -3.5 dB through and a -4.4-dB coupling at 90 GHz. A less than ±1-dB amplitude and a ±4° phase errors from 55 to 110 GHz are recorded.Peer reviewe

Design of high-performance E-band SPDT switch and LNA in 0.13 μm SiGe BiCMOS technology

This paper presents the design of high-performance E-band single-pole double-through (SPDT) switch and low noise amplifier (LNA) as a part of transceiver front-end in an 0.13 μm SiGe BiCMOS technology. The quarter-wave shunt SPDT switch is designed using reverse-saturated SiGe HBTs. The resulting switch exhibits an insertion loss of 2.1 dB, isolation of 26 dB, reflection coefficient better than 18 dB at 75 GHz and provides a bandwidth of more than 35 GHz. The designed switch is integrated with a single-in differential-output (SIDO) low noise amplifier (LNA) and utilized as input matching element of the LNA. The LNA utilizes a common-emitter amplifier at the first stage and a casocode amplifier at the second stage to exploit the advantages of both common-emitter and cascode topologies. The resulting LNA with integrated switch achieves a gain and noise figure(NF) of 26 dB and 6.9 dB, respectively at 75 GHz with a 3 dB bandwidth of 12 GHz. Output referred 1-dB compression point of +5.5 dBm is achieved at 75 GHz.The designed integrated block consumes 45.5 mW of DC power and occupies an area of 720 μm × 580 μm excluding RF pads.Peer reviewe