Silicon germanium BiCMOS phased-array antenna front-ends for extreme environment applications

The objective of this research is to understand the design and performance of state-of-the-art silicon-germanium (SiGe) BiCMOS high-frequency circuits for phased-array radar and wireless communication systems operating in extreme environment conditions. This work investigates the performance of RF circuits over a wide-temperature and exposure to a radiation intensive environment. The design and characterization of a fully integrated transmit/receive (T/R) module and integration onto a multi-element antenna array is presented. In addition, individual circuit blocks are characterized in these extreme environments. The following is a summary contributions: 1. Design and characterization of SiGe HBT based X-band LNAs [74, 78, 81]. 2. Development of an integrated SiGe BiCMOS X-band T/R module and assembly of 64 element active phased-array receive antenna [72]. 3. Design of on-wafer wide-temperature noise figure measurement setup and characterization of low-temperature noise figure of SiGe HBT devices and LNAs [82]. 4. Design of on-wafer wide-temperature two-tone linearity measurement setup using a network analyzer and signal generator and measurement of a low-power LNA from 173 to 300 K. 5. Investigation of total dose radiation effects on BiCMOS phase shifters [77]. 6. Design of a novel SiGe HBT based device, called the inverse-mode cascode (IMC), for use in radiation tolerant digital circuits [75].