Ultra-wideband and 60 GHz transceiver front-end CMOS circuits for short-range wireless communications

Interest in short-range wireless communications has been increasing. Besides existing narrowband systems such as Bluetooth and Zigbee, Ultra Wideband (UWB) and mm-wave band e.g. 60 GHz band wireless technology are attractive research topics due to their high data rates, low power consumption and robustness to harsh multipath environments.;We then design a low-power, high-speed, highly integrated wideband variable gain amplifier (VGA) for a 60 GHz mm-wave transceiver front-end. We present an inductorless VGA using a dual feedback loop to cancel the DC-offset and extend the bandwidth. Chip measurement results show that the stand-alone VGA achieves performances exceeding that of existing VGAs according to several metrics. The 60GHz receiver including LNA, mixer and VGA was fabricated in 90 nm CMOS. Measurement results demonstrate the functionality from a 1 V power supply. Another VGA is designed and fabricated in a fully integrated 60 GHz transceiver system using a digital 90 nm CMOS process as part of a larger collaborative project. On-going wireless testing has been performed for the 60 GHz transceiver using external commercial 25 dBi horn antennas over up to one meter distance and data rates measured up to 4 Gb/s.;We first develop a conceptual UWB transceiver with low circuit complexity, high data rate, and low power consumption targeted to short-range wireless chip testing applications. We implement the system in a standard CMOS technology for low cost and potential integration onto future systems-on-chip (SoC). The proposed UWB system consists of: an impulse-based transmitter, wideband wireless interconnect, and an impulse-based receiver. We propose new design methods for the Gaussian monocycle impulse generator in a UWB transmitter. The proposed wideband transformer operates not only as wireless interconnect between transmitter and receiver but provides bandpass filtering and electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection for human body model (HBM). We have also developed several topologies for low noise amplifiers (LNA) for UWB receiver front-ends. The functional behavior of the UWB transceiver is validated using post-layout simulation results in a 90 nm CMOS technology from a 1 V supply.