Research On Frequency Conversion Technology In Radio Frequency Millimeter Wave Integrated Circuits

With the rapid development of wireless technology,the application of the radio frequency?RF?and millimeter-wave?mm-wave?band is constantly emerging,leading to a great market potential.Therefore,it has attracted extensive attention in both industry and academia.In order to conform to the trend of system miniaturization and integration,RF and mm-wave integrated circuits?ICs?,especially low-cost silicon-based circuits,are the current research hotspots.In this paper,RF and mm-wave transceiver front-ends and key circuits?mixers and frequency multipliers?are studied in depth.The main research contents are divided into four parts:1.The research of high linearity and wideband up-conversion mixer.In order to improve the IF bandwidth and linearity performances of the traditional up-mixer,a two-path transconductance stage combining common-source?CS?stage and common-gate?CG?stage is proposed.The effects on linearity and IF impedance are analyzed in detail.In addition,a transformer-based 4^th-order resonator circuit is proposed to realize broadband impedance matching.Based on the above techniques,an E-band up-mixer is designed in a 65-nm CMOS process,which achieves 18 GHz and 23 GHz IF/RF bandwidth and 2.14 dBm IP_1dB.In addition,a 5G communication up-mixer is also designed,and achieves 5.5 GHz and 16 GHz IF/RF bandwidth and 0.42 dBm OP_1dB.Compared with other works in recent years,the two mixers achieve larger RF,IF bandwidth and better linearity.2.The research of the mm-wave high efficiency and broadband frequency doubler.In order to improve the working bandwidth,output power and efficiency of mm-wave frequency multiplier,two broadband matching circuits and an equivalent transconductance enhancement technology are proposed.The proposed two broadband matching circuits are applied to match impedances of input and output ports respectively.In addition,a transformer structure,which is constructed by the drain inductor in doubling stage and source inductor in buffer stage,and the coupling enhancement technology are introduced to improve the equivalent transconductance of buffer stage without increasing the chip size,thereby improving output power and efficiency.Fabrated in a 65-nm CMOS process,the proposed doubler achieves working bandwidth of 51-73 GHz,the maximum conversion gain of 0.8dB,the maximum output power of 5.7 dBm and efficiency of 19.5%.In the whole wording frequency band,the output power is more than 2.8 dBm,and the efficiency is more than 10%.3.In order to solve the problem of low efficiency of high-order harmonic frequency multipliers using FET nonlinearity,a self-mixing based high-order harmonic frequency multipling technology is introduced.To address the dc distortion,low output power and limited working bandwidth of traditional self-mixing frequency multiplier,a transformer-based self-mixing with peaking inductor structure is proposed.By inserting a transformer between the doubling and mixing stages,the dc distortion can be eliminated,and parasitics capacitance in the cascade structure can be resonated to improve the bandwidth and output power.In addition,adding a peaking inductor at the output of the mixing stage can further improve the output power and efficiency at high frequencies.The input and output broadband matching networks are further used to ensure the broadband characteristics of the whole frequency multiplier.Fabracted in an UMC 110-nm CMOS technology,a K-band frequency tripler achieves 17.7-29.7 GHz 50.6%relative bandwidth and 15.2%efficiency at a 7.2 mW power consumption.4.Based on above researches,a multi-channel transceiver system applied in 39 GHz band for 5G communication is further studied in this paper.For the 5G multi-beam MIMO architecture,a highly integrated CMOS multi-channel system scheme,a variety of circuit improvement technologies and high performance packaging solutions are proposed.A transceiver chip which integrates two frequency conversion channels,one LO chain and one SPI control module is realized in a 65 nm CMOS process.The transceiver chip is the first multi-channel chip applied in 39 GHz band,and supports 256 QAM modulation schem.It has been successfully applied to 5G MIMO prototype,and achieves an excellent outdoor communication performance.