Variable attenuators are important circuits that can be employed in many radio frequency (RF) applications, e.g., in automatic gain control (AGC) amplifiers, broadband gain-control blocks at RF frequencies or as broadband vector modulators. For any applications, low insertion phase shift and low power consumption are of interest. A way to implement variable attenuators is using the RF PIN diode. The PIN diode is characterized by a low doped (I = intrinsic) semiconductor region between p- (P) and n-type (N) semiconductor regions. Besides the variable attenuators, the PIN-diode is used in other RF circuits, such as RF switches, limiters and phase shifters. This project presents the design of variable attenuators at 7.5 GHz and 500 MHz frequency bandwidth for ultra-wideband (UWB) applications using two different PIN diodes. The variable attenuators have a topology based on 90° hybrid couplers. The design is performed using Advance Design Systems (ADS) from Agilent Technologies Inc. After presenting the PIN diode and its equivalent circuit, the theory of the 90° passive directional branch line coupler and the operation principle of the variable attenuators are presented. As the selection of the appropriate PIN diode is a critical step in the design, special attention is dedicated to this aspect. It follows the design of the variable attenuators with extensive descriptions of the simulations in ADS. Firstly, both series and shunt attenuators are presented. However, as these circuits normally offer narrow band variable attenuation, the 900 directional branch line coupler is used in the attenuator for broader band operation. At the end, a double hybrid coupler is found to eliminate the ripple in the high attenuation state of the single hybrid coupled attenuator. So the final topology of the variable attenuator is a double hybrid coupler variable attenuator- Moreover, in this project, different PIN diodes are investigated for variable attenuator applications. Different manufacture companies are currently providing different kinds of PIN diodes in terms of parameters and packages. Every type of PIN diodes are providing different sort of advantages to the designers. That is why it has become more difficult for the RF designers to choose the right device for the specified application. Beside the design of the variable attenuator using PIN diodes, some considerations in form of a guide line to the designers while they are using the PIN diode for designing the variable attenuator. In this work, the used PIN diodes are a beam lead PIN diode and chip PIN diode. The beam lead PIN diode is used because it is manufactured for high frequency and it produces excellent electrical performance and isolation at high frequencies. On the other hand, the chip PIN diode eliminates the problem of package parasitics. However, printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing limitations at the university laboratory incline the balance in the favor of the beam lead PIN diode, HPND- 4005 from Avagotech, instead of the also considered chip diode MA-COM MA4P202.

Designing CMOS linear transmitter front-end, specially the power amplifiers (PAs), in multi-band wireless transceivers is a major challenge for the single-chip integration of a CMOS radio. In some of the linear PA systems, for example, polar- or predistortion-PA system, amplitude and phase control circuits are used to suppress the distortion produces by the PA core. The requirements of these controlling circuits are much different from their conventional role in a receiver or a phase array system. In this dissertation, the special design issues will be addressed, and the circuit topologies of the amplitude and phase controllers will be proposed. In attempt to control the high-power input signal of a PA system, a highly linear variable attenuator with adaptive body biasing is first introduced. The voltage swing on the signal path is intentionally coupled to the body terminal of the triple-well NMOS devices to reduce their impedance variation. The fabricated variable attenuator shows a significant improvement on linearity as compared to previous CMOS works. The results of this research are then used to build a variable gain amplifier for linear PA systems that requires gain of its amplitude tuning circuits. Different from the conventional attenuator-based VGAs, the high linearity of the suggested attenuator allows it to be put after the gain stage in the presented VGA topology. This arrangement along with the current boosting technique gives the VGA a better noise performance while having a linear-in-dB tuning curve and better worst-case linearity. The following part of the dissertation is about a compact, linear-in-degree tuned variable phase shifter as the phase controller in the PA system. This design uses a modified RC poly-phase filter to produce a set of an orthogonal phase vectors with smaller loss. A specially designed control circuit combines these vectors and generates an output signal with different phases, while having very small gain mismatches at different phase setting. The proposed amplitude and phase control circuits are then verified with a system level analysis. The results show that the proposed designs successfully reduce the non-linear effect of a wireless transmitter.

The growth in the number of wireless devices and applications underscores the need for characterizing and mitigating interference induced problems such as distortion and blocking. A typical interference scenario involves the detection of a small amplitude signal of interest (SOI) in the presence of a large amplitude interfering signal; it is desirable to attenuate the interfering signal while preserving the integrity of SOI and an appropriate dynamic range. If the frequency of the interfering signal varies or is unknown, an adaptive notch function must be applied in order to maintain adequate attenuation. This work explores the performance space of a phase cancellation technique used in implementing the desired notch function for communication systems in the 1-3 GHz frequency range. A system level model constructed with MATLAB and related simulation results assist in building the theoretical foundation for setting performance bounds on the implemented solution and deriving hardware specifications for the RF notch subsystem devices. Simulations and measurements are presented for a Low Noise Amplifer (LNA), voltage variable attenuators, bandpass filters and phase shifters. Ultimately, full system tests provide a measure of merit for this work as well as invaluable lessons learned. The emphasis of this project is the on-wafer LNA measurements, dependence of IC system performance on mismatches and overall system performance tests. Where possible, predictions are plotted alongside measured data. The reasonable match between the two validates system and component models and more than compensates for the painstaking modeling efforts. Most importantly, using the signal to interferer ratio (SIR) as a figure of merit, experimental results demonstrate up to 58 dB of SIR improvement. This number represents a remarkable advancement in interference rejection at RF or microwave frequencies.