Passive and active circuits in cmos technology for rf, microwave and millimeter wave applications

摘要

The permeation of CMOS technology to radio frequencies and beyond hasfuelled an urgent need for a diverse array of passive and active circuits that address thechallenges of rapidly emerging wireless applications. While traditional analog baseddesign approaches satisfy some applications, the stringent requirements of newlyemerging applications cannot necessarily be addressed by existing design ideas andcompel designers to pursue alternatives. One such alternative, an amalgamation ofmicrowave and analog design techniques, is pursued in this work.A number of passive and active circuits have been designed using a combinationof microwave and analog design techniques. For passives, the most crucial challenge totheir CMOS implementation is identified as their large dimensions that are notcompatible with CMOS technology. To address this issue, several design techniques ?including multi-layered design and slow wave structures ? are proposed anddemonstrated through experimental results after being suitably tailored for CMOStechnology. A number of novel passive structures - including a compact 10 GHz hairpin resonator, a broadband, low loss 25-35 GHz Lange coupler, a 25-35 GHz thin filmmicrostrip (TFMS) ring hybrid, an array of 0.8 nH and 0.4 nH multi-layered high selfresonant frequency (SRF) inductors are proposed, designed and experimentally verified.A number of active circuits are also designed and notable experimental resultsare presented. These include 3-10 GHz and DC-20 GHz distributed low noise amplifiers(LNA), a dual wideband Low noise amplifier and 15 GHz distributed voltage controlledoscillators (DVCO). Distributed amplifiers are identified as particularly effective in thedevelopment of wideband receiver front end sub-systems due to their gain flatness,excellent matching and high linearity. The most important challenge to theimplementation of distributed amplifiers in CMOS RFICs is identified as the issue oftheir miniaturization. This problem is solved by using integrated multi-layered inductorsinstead of transmission lines to achieve over 90% size compression compared to earlierCMOS implementations. Finally, a dual wideband receiver front end sub-system isdesigned employing the miniaturized distributed amplifier with resonant loads andintegrated with a double balanced Gilbert cell mixer to perform dual band operation. Thereceiver front end measured results show 15 dB conversion gain, and a 1-dBcompression point of -4.1 dBm in the centre of band 1 (from 3.1 to 5.0 GHz) and -5.2dBm in the centre of band 2 (from 5.8 to 8 GHz) with input return loss less than 10 dBthroughout the two bands of operation.