Due to the recent interest in broadband antennas a microstrip patch antenna was developed to meet the need for a cheap, low profile, broadband antenna. This antenna could be used in a wide range of applications such as in the communications industry for cell phones or satellite communication. Particle Swarm Optimization was used to design the dual-linear polarization broadband microstrip antenna and impedance matching network. This optimization method greatly reduced the time needed to find viable antenna parameters. A dual input patch antenna with over 30% bandwidth in the X-band was simulated using Ansoft's High Frequency Structural Simulator (HFSS) in conjunction with Particle Swarm Optimization. A single input and a dual input antenna was then fabricated. The fabricated antennas were composed of stacked microstrip patches over a set of bowtie apertures in the ground plane that were perpendicular to one another. A dual offset microstrip feedline was used to feed the aperture. Two different layers were used for the microstrip feedline of each polarization. The resulting measured impedance bandwidth was even wider than predicted. The antenna pattern was measured at several frequencies over the antenna bandwidth and was found to have good gain, consistent antenna patterns and low cross polarization.

In the future, space solar power transmission and wireless power transmission will play an important role in gathering clean and infinite energy from space. The rectenna, i.e., a rectifying circuit combined with an antenna, is one of the most important components in the wireless power transmission system. To obtain high power and high output voltage, the use of a large rectenna array is necessary. Many novel rectennas and rectenna arrays for microwave and millimeter-wave wireless power transmission have been developed. Unlike the traditional rectifying circuit using a single diode, dual diodes are used to double the DC output voltage with the same circuit layout dimensions. The rectenna components are then combined to form rectenna arrays using different interconnections. The rectennas and the arrays are analyzed by using a linear circuit model. Furthermore, to precisely align the mainbeams of the transmitter and the receiver, a retrodirective array is developed to maintain high efficiency. The retrodirective array is able to track the incident wave and resend the signal to where it came from without any prior known information of the source location. The ultra-wideband radio has become one of the most important communication systems because of demand for high data-rate transmission. Hence, ultra-wideband antennas have received much attention in mobile wireless communications. Planar monopole ultra-wideband antennas for UHF, microwave, and millimeter-wave bands are developed, with many advantages such as simple structure, low cost, light weight, and ease of fabrication. Due to the planar structures, the ultra-wideband antennas can be easily integrated with other circuits. On the other hand, with an ultra-wide bandwidth, source power can be transmitted at different frequencies dependent on power availability. Furthermore, the ultra-wideband antenna can potentially handle wireless power transmission and data communications simultaneously. The technologies developed can also be applied to dual-frequency or the multi-frequency antennas. In this dissertation, many new rectenna arrays, retrodirective rectenna arrays, and ultra-wideband antennas are presented for microwave and millimeter-wave applications. The technologies are not only very useful for wireless power transmission and communication systems, but also they could have many applications in future radar, surveillance, and remote sensing systems.

Ultra-wideband technology (UWB) has received tremendous attention since the FCC license release in 2002, which expedited the research and development of UWB technologies on consumer products. The applications of UWB range from ground penetrating radar, distance sensor, through wall radar to high speed, short distance communications. The CMOS integrated circuit is an attractive, low cost approach for implementing UWB technology. The improving cut-off frequency of the transistor in CMOS process makes the CMOS circuit capable of handling signal at multi-giga herz. However, some design challenges still remain to be solved. Unlike regular narrow band signal, the UWB signal is discrete pulse instead of continuous wave (CW), which results in the occupancy of wide frequency range. This demands that UWB front-end circuits deliver both time domain and frequency domain signal processing over broad bandwidth. Witnessing these technique challenges, this dissertation aims at designing novel, high performance components for UWB signal generation, down-conversion, as well as accurate timing control using low cost CMOS technology. We proposed, designed and fabricated a carrier based UWB transmitter to facilitate the discrete feature of the UWB signal. The transmitter employs novel twostage -switching to generate carrier based UWB signal. The structure not only minimizes the current consumption but also eliminates the use of a UWB power amplifier. The fabricated transmitter is capable of delivering tunable UWB signal over the complete 3.1GHz -10.6GHz UWB band. By applying the similar two-stage switching approach, we were able to implement a novel switched-LNA based UWB sampling receiver frontend. The proposed front-end has significantly lower power consumption compared to previously published design while keep relatively high gain and low noise at the same time. The designed sampling mixer shows unprecedented performance of 9-12dB voltage conversion gain, 16-25dB noise figure, and power consumption of only 21.6mW(with buffer) and 11.7mW(without buffer) across dc to 3.5GHz with 100M-Hz sampling frequency. The implementation of a precise delay generator is also presented in the dissertation. It relies on an external reference clock to provide accurate timing against process, supply voltage and temperature variation through a negative feedback loop. The delay generator prototype has been verified having digital programmability and tunable delay step resolution. The relative delay shift from desired value is limited to within 0.2%.

This work describes the design and measurement of a compact bidirectional ultrawideband (UWB) modified equiangular spiral antenna with an integrated feed internally matched to a 50-Ohm microstrip transmission line. A UWB transition from microstrip to double-sided parallel-strip line (DSPSL) soldered to a short (1.14 mm) twin-line transmission line feeds the spiral. The currents on the feed travel in a direction approximately perpendicular to the direction of the currents on the spiral at the points where the feed passes the spiral in close proximity (0.57 mm). Holes were etched from the metal arms of the spiral to reduce the impedance mismatch caused by coupling between the transmission line feed and the spiral. This work also describes a low-loss back-to-back transition from coaxial line to DSPSL, an in-phase connectorized 3 dB DSPSL power divider made using three of those transitions, a 2:1 in-phase DSPSL power divider, a 3:1 in-phase DSPSL power divider, a radial dipole fed by DSPSL, an array of those dipoles utilizing the various power dividers, and a UWB circular monopole antenna fed by DSPSL. Measured and simulated results show good agreement for the designed antennas and circuits.

Low drop out (LDO) voltage regulators are widely used for post regulating the switching ripples generated by the switched mode power supplies (SMPS). Due to demand for portable applications, industry is pushing for complete system on chip power management solutions. Hence, the switching frequencies of the SMPS are increasing to allow higher level of integration. Therefore, the subsequent post-regulator LDO must have good power supply rejection (PSR) up to switching frequencies of SMPS. Unfortunately, the conventional LDOs have poor PSR at high frequencies. The objective of this research is to develop novel LDO regulators that can achieve good high frequency PSR performance. In this thesis, two PSR improvement methods are presented. The first method proposes a novel power supply noise-cancelling scheme to improve the PSR of an external-capacitor LDO. The proposed power supply noise-cancelling scheme is designed using adaptive power consumption, thereby not degrading the power efficiency of the LDO. The second method proposes a feed forward ripple cancellation technique to improve the PSR of capacitor-less LDO; also a dynamically powered transient improvement scheme has been proposed. The feed forward ripple cancellation is designed by reusing the load transient improvement block, thus achieving the improvement in PSR with no additional power consumption. Both the projects have been designed in TSMC 0.18 μm technology. The first method achieves a PSR of 66 dB up to 1 MHz where as the second method achieves a 55 dB PSR up to 1 MHz.

The Ultra-Wideband (UWB) communication technology has been extensively attended in recent years. In this thesis, we propose the improved selective-Rake receiver and analyze the performance on UWB channels. The UWB transmission channels are modeled with statistical methods and its fading characteristics are discussed. Different impulse radio properties for the UWB communication system are analyzed. The system performance and design complexity issues of selective-Rake receiver (SRake) are studied. Rake receiver has difficulties achieving desired system performance in the dense multipath environment. The main ideas of SRake receiver are to obtain the SNR level on known multipath channel and to determine the desired number of Rake fingers. Matched filters and maximum likelihood detectors are utilized in the implementation of the SRake to estimate the signal time delay. The CLEAN algorithm is then used in selecting the paths with relatively high energy. Furthermore, we also propose a noise cancellation scheme for performance improvement in the SRake receiver. In the noise cancellation scheme, the multiresolution property of wavelet transform is used for filtering the noise interference caused by the rapid fluctuation factor. In addition, a two-stage search is combined with the original CLEAN algorithm to increase the accuracy of path selection. From our simulation results on the UWB channels, the improved SRake receiver, with noise cancellation and two-stage search, indeed has high SRake output SNR and better path accuracy than the original SRake receiver.

This thesis presents mobile positioning and tracking with non-line of sight (NLOS) mitigation using time difference of arrival (TDOA) in biased extended Kalman filter (BEKF) in indoor dense multipath Ultra-Wideband (UWB) environment. The most serious issues which render to influence accuracy for the time-based location system is NLOS problem. Kalman filters (KFs) are used for smoothing range measurement data, and a method with sliding window is proposed to process range data for calculating standard deviation in a hypothesis testing and then identifying NLOS scenarios. When the measured arrival time has been converted to range difference, the biased extended Kalman filter is proposed to mitigate the NLOS error in the certain base stations (BSs) for mobile station (MS) positioning and trajectory tracking. From the simulation results in the indoor positioning environment with measurement and NLOS error, the sliding window algorithm and biased extended Kalman filter have higher accuracy than other related methods for NLOS identification and mitigation in positioning.

In this thesis, an algorithm based on frequency-space domain MUSIC method is presented for estimating the propagation delay of a wireless multipath channel.For indoor geolocation systems, the time-of-arrival (TOA) is the most popular technique for accurate positioning system. The basic idea in TOA-based techniques is to accurately estimate the propagation delay of the radio signal arriving from the direct line-of-sight (DLOS) path. However, dense multipath environments may cause unresolved paths, and yield an error in the estimation of the DLOS path. UWB (Ultra-wideband) technology provides an excellent means for wireless positioning due to its high resolution capability in the time domain. Its ability to resolving multipath components makes it possible to obtain accurate location estimates. In this thesis, we investigate the use of UWB signals in positioning and combine frequency-domain MUSIC algorithm. At the same time, the structure of time-space-time method is studied. In addition, we propose a frequency-space domain MUSIC algorithm, called FSF-MUSIC algorithm, and use the spatial smoothing technique to improve the performance of the algorithm. For a two-multipath case, analysis and simulation results of multipath resolvability and the variance of estimation errors of signal arrival time are discussed.

The first topic of this thesis is a voltage boost level clamping circuit for a flash memory which utilizes an implicit feedback loop as well as MOS transistors with different threshold voltages. The proposed design can be added to charge pumps to stabilize the output voltage. The unwanted output voltage spikes introduced by the linear pumping ratio are prevented. Not only are possible damages to memory cores avoided, the power disspation is reduced in contrast with prior regulator methods. The second topic is a switch-current 3-bit CMOS wideband random signal generator, which utilizes a digital normalizer to flatten the distribution of the probability in the entire range of B parameter. The ¡§colored¡¨ random numbers problem in prior designs is resolved. In addition, the coefficients of the proposed design are dynamically adjustable.

The cost to test chips has risen tremendously. Additionally, the process for testing all functionalities of both analog and digital part is far from simple. One attractive option is moving some or all of the testing functions onto the chip itself leading to the use of built-in self-tests (BISTs). The frequency generator or frequency synthesizer is a key element of the BIST. It generates the clock frequencies needed for testing. A wide-band frequency synthesizer is designed in the project. The architecture of a PLL is analyzed as well as the modifications carried out. The modified structure has three blocks: basic PLL based frequency synthesizer, frequency down-converter, and output selector. Each of these blocks is analyzed and designed. This frequency synthesizer system overcomes challenges faced by the traditional PLL based frequency synthesizer.