Silicon-Based Microwave And Millimeter-Wave Phased-Array Transceiver Chips Design

Active phased-arrays have been widely used in radar and wireless communication systems since they allow faster beam forming and nulling of the interferences from different directions, thus result in better signal-to-noise ratio(SNR) and higher channel capacity. Traditionally, III-V technologies(InP or GaAs) are utilized to fabricate the active phased arrays due to their better performance on output power and noise figure(NF). However, to perform active electronic scanning, a phased array system usually needs thousands of Transmit/Receive(T/R) modules, which are extremely costly. Compared with III-V technologies, silicon-based technologies can provide higher integration level at much lower cost, although the power handling ability, NF, and linearity cannot outperform their III-V counterparts. Therefore, it is popular to use III-V technologies to perform low noise amplification and high power delivering but deploy low-cost silicon-based technologies to perform beam forming.Each element of the beam forming circuits, known as the multifunctional chip(MFC), which is the bottleneck of the active phased-array technologies, needs to perform low-noise amplification, phase/gain control, and medium power delievering. An X-band phased-array transceiver for weapon control/track radars and a Ka-band phased-array transceiver for satellite communications are proposed in this dissertation using a 0.13-μm SiGe BiCMOS technology. The phased-array transceivers with transmit and receive paths integrate low noise amplifier(LNA), power amplifier(PA), phase shifter, and loss compensation amplifiers(LCAs), and control switches. There are several highlights in the building blocks design as well as in the whole transceivers design. Some technical explorations for microwave and millmeter-wave phased-array transceiver chips design have been done in this dissertation towards practical applications.When designing the small signal amplifiers, this dissertation presents LCAs with distributed structure to compensate for the passive loss in the signal path to ease the system bandwidth drop resulted from cascading of two many amplifiers. This is the first time that distributed amplifier(DA) is utilized in phased-array transceiver designs to ease the bandwidth drop problem. At the same time, different noise sources contributing to NF of DAs are analized, which implies that DAs can also be candidates for LNA designs in midband. Then an X-band LNA and a Ka-band LNA are designed using distributed structure.It is necessary to design PAs with high output power to improve the effective operating range of phased-array radars. However, the breakdown voltages of the transistors in advanced silicon-based technologies continue to drop, which servely llimits the output voltage swing and output power of silicon PAs. Analysis and design of stacked PAs have been done in this dissertation; at the same time, high frequency compensation networks between adjacent stacked transistors have been adopted in the PAs design to make the stacked voltages in phase thus improves the stack efficiency. With the proposed design, PAs with high output power are achieved without breakdown problems. Of the two PAs for X- and Ka-band, the saturated output power of X-band stacked PA is 890 mW, which is the highest in on-chip PA designs using silicon-based technologies.In the design of microwave control circuits, X- and Ka-band SPDT switches adopting shunt-NMOS topology are firstly designed to alleviate the trade-offs between insertion loss and isolation in traditional series-NMOS topology. The SPDT switches are used not only in T/R selection switches, but also in the switched networks in the phase shifters. In order to achieve good phase resolution and gain consistency, 5-bit Xand Ka-band swithed high-pass/low-path filter phase shifters with good phase resolution are designed using the switches designed above.Finally, the X- and Ka-band phased-array transceiver chips are designed considering gain, NF, impedence matching, output power, phase control, and layout et al. of the transmit and receive paths. Measurement results show that our proposed X- and Ka-band phased-array transceivers achieve high gain and high output power compared to state-of-the-arts; at the same time, there lies another advantage in our proposed transceiver chips that with very low RMS phase/gain errors are achieved.