Research On Key Devices Of RF Receiver Front-End And Integrated System

As the study in the field of RF and microwave is becoming more solid and broad, in-depth and systemic, the RF receiver plays a more important role in promoting the improvement of national economic development, people’s material standards of living, national defense and space exploration etc. The RF receiver is highly being developed toward the aspects of low-cost, low power consumption, miniaturization, multi-functional, high performance and multi-modes etc. The zero-IF architecture is a preferred choice for the construction of a high-performance integrated single-chipped receiver. Under the background of the digital circuit technique becoming more and more maturity, the design of the RF part has become a critical factor on deciding the overall system performance. The key issues of CMOS RFIC front-end have been studied in this dissertation.First, the electrical parameters of inductors with different geometry structures have been calculated by use of the compact lumped model of spiral inductor on silicon(SIOS) and the full-wave EM simulator software, these structures include planar square, planar eight-goon, planar circular, planar differential single-layer and planar differential double-layers etc. The reasons for the poor performance of the inductors were analyzed and the principles of designing inductors were summarized based on the previous and this work. Similarly, the CMOS MIM capacitance design principles were obtained by combining circuit simulation and3D-EM simulation. Specifically, RF MIM type capacitance sensitivity was studied by the method of classification experiment, simulation comparison and theoretical analysis.Second, a dynamic-link experiment platform for RFIC design under the Linux system have been constructed, which greatly shorted the RFIC design process and makes the experimental simulation more reliable, especially it apparently improves the efficiency of the cooperating optimization among circuits. The design process of the RFIC simulation is usually divided into two parts i.e. the early and late. Pre-simulation typically uses RF circuit design software to finish the circuit schematic design, which is in the Windows platform environment. Post-simulation typically uses Cadence software to layout the printing board and extract the circuit parasitic parameters and its working environment is the Linux platform. This two working platform is not consistent, which leads pre-and post-data of the RFIC simulation and design of the whole process to frequently transform among exporting, converting, importing. The manual data-replacement is not convenient and prone to occur errors. In the Linux environment the dynamic link experiment simulation platform has effectively solved the problem of communication and coordination between the pre and post simulation. It may be applied to the field of the microwave circuit simulation. Based on TSMC CM018RF structure, two designs of a traditional Cascaded CMOS LNA and an improved CMOS LNA were given, a comparative study and results analysis were done by the dynamic link experimental simulation platform. The results show that the platform brought obvious enhancement on efficiency of the RFIC design process.Then, a test verification platform of zero-IF receiver was built in the form of measured data of the system components. It solved the performance planning issues among the overall system, different sub-modules and also made the behavior level simulation of confirming the function and performance more reliable. Simulation was done with the measured data, so it may provide the judgment basis to accurately grasp the system functions to ensure the system performance can be predicted as real as possible in the early stage of the design and at the same time it also provide a convenient way to reduce development costs and adjust the system architecture in time. The experimental data of the inductor and LNA were imported in the simulation experiment by use of the DAC component in RF circuit design software and the test result curves is agreement with the curve that generated by the tables of discrete Excel data.Finally, it is summarized that the research results of this dissertation about the key issues of CMOS RFIC front-end and the future development of the study.