Analysis And Design Of Sillicon-Based RF And Millimeter-Wave Circuits In Multi-Channel Front-End Systems

To meet the increased requirement of high data-rate wireless communication,the silicon based multi-channel systems for Radio-Frequency(RF)and millimeter-wave(mmWave)applications have been widely studied in both academic and industrial fields.In this dissertation,the RF&mm Wave multi-channel phased-array front-end systems and their key building blocks,including phase shifter and low-noise amplifier,are deeply researched.The contents can be divided into five parts shown as follows.1.According to the analysis of CMOS transistor's layout,a layout-dependent parasitic model and its scalable model are developed,which can be used in mm Wave and sub-mmWave bands.The models are verified by the EM simulations.Based on the studying of the layout-dependent parasitic effects of transistors,two layouts of a differential pair and a cross-coupled pair are optimized to improve the RF performance.2.With a behavior model,the influence of a noiseless/low-noise active input matching network on inductorless circuits is analyzed.A noise-cancellation technique is used to realize the low-noise active input matching network to achieve a wideband inductorless low-noise amplifier(LNA).Compared with the traditional noise-cancellation LNA,the power consumption of the design is effectively reduced.In the theoretical analysis,the phase mismatch between the two parallel active paths of the structure is also carefully analyzed,and the post-layout simulations verify the analysis on the phase mismatch.3.To reduce the insertion loss and power consumption of traditional active phase shifters,a new vector-summing phase shifter is proposed with a tunable current-splitting technique.A balun based current-reuse tehnique is also applied to further reduce power consumption.Ultilizing a 90 nm CMOS process,an active phase shifter based on the proposed structure is fabricated.It achieves a 1.1dB maximum average power gain and a root-mean-square(RMS)phase error of 2.3~7.6° with drawing 19.8mW dc power.4.To improve the gain,noise figure,and bandwidth of CMOS mmWave LNA,a transformer based Gm-boosting technique and a pole-tuning method are proposed.Based on both the techniques,a broadband mmWave LNA with a 35.6-GHz 3-dB gain bandwidth is achieved with a 19 mW power consumption.Meanwhile,it also have a good power gain(17.7d B@67GHz)and a low noise figure(5.4dB@65GHz).With the transformer based Gm-boosting technique,a V-band LNA is also designed.With consuming only 10 mW dc power,it achieves a minimum noise figure of 3.9 dB and a 17.4-dB gain.5.Based on the above researches,a Ku band 2-channel phased array front-end system is studyed and designed.It is realized in a full differential strcuture to minimize the effects of layout parasitic parameters and packaging.The on-chip system achieves 5-bit phase resolution and 4-bit amplitude resolution.