High Performance Millimeter Wave Transceiver Circuits for V-Band Applications using Silicon Processes

Wireless applications are embedded into many electronic products. The lower frequency bands have been allocated with various applications, but this allocation increases the concern of bandwidth congestion. V-band spectrum, from 57 GHz to 64 GHz, has great potential due to its wide available bandwidth. Recent research and commercial products have shown that, the feasibility of wireless systems in the millimeter-wave frequency band improves as technology progresses. However, the required bandwidths are still high for the silicon technology.;Moreover, at millimeter-wave frequencies, many device parasitics are significant. Parasitics neglected at lower frequencies such as gate inductance and resistance may turn into major design disruptions. The intrinsic model that is heavily relied upon often becomes insignificant. Most of the time, designers have to spend tremendous amounts of time on simulation and device modeling to achieve adequate performance for V-band. Another noticeable change for the millimeter-wave circuit is the usage of passive components. The design of microstrip structures to replace traditional lumped components becomes favorable due to the size reduction of microstrip structures at millimeter-wave frequencies.;To demonstrate the design methodology, a few often used transceiver circuit blocks have been designed. These blocks includes the Power Amplifier (PA), which is normally used in the transmitter chain, a Low Noise Amplifier (LNA), the first active circuit on the receiver chain, and a Voltage-Controlled Oscillator (VCO), which is used in both transmitter and receiver chains. The power amplifier was fabricated using 90 nm TSMC CMOS process. It outputs 20 dBm of saturation power and has power gain of 20.6 dBm. The Low Noise Amplifier and Voltage-Controlled Oscillator were fabricated using a 0.13 im IBM BiCMOS SiGe 8HP process. The LNA has simulated gain of 17 dB across the 57 GHz to 64 GHz band and has noise figure of 4.5 dB. The VCO has a simulated phase noise of -111 dBc at 10 MHz of frequency offset of 60 GHz and tuning range from 56 GHz to 65 GHz.