The permeation of CMOS technology to radio frequencies and beyond has
fuelled an urgent need for a diverse array of passive and active circuits that address the
challenges of rapidly emerging wireless applications. While traditional analog based
design approaches satisfy some applications, the stringent requirements of newly
emerging applications cannot necessarily be addressed by existing design ideas and
compel designers to pursue alternatives. One such alternative, an amalgamation of
microwave and analog design techniques, is pursued in this work.
A number of passive and active circuits have been designed using a combination
of microwave and analog design techniques. For passives, the most crucial challenge to
their CMOS implementation is identified as their large dimensions that are not
compatible with CMOS technology. To address this issue, several design techniques –
including multi-layered design and slow wave structures – are proposed and
demonstrated through experimental results after being suitably tailored for CMOS
technology. 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 film
microstrip (TFMS) ring hybrid, an array of 0.8 nH and 0.4 nH multi-layered high self
resonant frequency (SRF) inductors are proposed, designed and experimentally verified.
A number of active circuits are also designed and notable experimental results
are 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 controlled
oscillators (DVCO). Distributed amplifiers are identified as particularly effective in the
development of wideband receiver front end sub-systems due to their gain flatness,
excellent matching and high linearity. The most important challenge to the
implementation of distributed amplifiers in CMOS RFICs is identified as the issue of
their miniaturization. This problem is solved by using integrated multi-layered inductors
instead of transmission lines to achieve over 90% size compression compared to earlier
CMOS implementations. Finally, a dual wideband receiver front end sub-system is
designed employing the miniaturized distributed amplifier with resonant loads and
integrated with a double balanced Gilbert cell mixer to perform dual band operation. The
receiver front end measured results show 15 dB conversion gain, and a 1-dB
compression point of -4.1 dBm in the centre of band 1 (from 3.1 to 5.0 GHz) and -5.2
dBm in the centre of band 2 (from 5.8 to 8 GHz) with input return loss less than 10 dB
throughout the two bands of operation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2069 |
| Date | 15 May 2009 |
| Creators | Chirala, Mohan Krishna |
| Contributors | NGUYEN, CAM |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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