DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN X-BAND LOW-POWER AND HIGH-ISOLATION CMOS ACTIVE CIRCULATOR

摘要

In this paper, a 3-port active circulator using three quasi-circulators (QCs) is designed and fabricated by a standard 0.18-mu m CMOS technology. The QC provides a signal-cancellation mechanism, and therefore, the circulator is practical by connecting the three QCs in a ring-type configuration. With power consumption of 16 mW, the QC-based circulator reveals 6.1 similar to 7.5-dB insertion loss, better than 25-dB isolation and 17.5-dB transmission ratio from 8.8 to 9.9 GHz. The design features excellent performances in low power, high isolation, and high transmission ratio compared to other CMOS active circulators or QCs. Moreover, the design concept is also applicable to an n-port circulator design. (C) 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.