Silicon-germanium HBT BiCMOS RF front-ends for radar systems

The objective of this research is to explore the possibilities of developing transmit/receive (T/R) modules using silicon-germanium (SiGe) heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) BiCMOS technology to integrate with organic liquid crystal polymer (LCP) packages for the next-generation phased-array radar system. The T/R module requirements are low power, compact, lightweight, low cost, high performance, and high reliability. All these requirements have provided a very strong motivation for developing fully monolithic T/R modules. SiGe HBT BiCMOS technology is an excellent candidate to integrate all the RF circuit blocks on the T/R module into a single die and thus, reducing the overall cost and size of the phase-array radar system. In addition, this research also investigates the effects and the modeling issues of LCP package on the SiGe circuits at X-band. The contributions from this research work are summarized as follows:;1. Design of an X-band SiGe power amplifier (PA) for monolithically integrated phased-array T/R modules.;2. Design of a low-loss and low-noise tunable, monolithic X-band SiGe active bandpass filter [1].;3. Investigation of temperature effects on SiGe tunable filter [1].;4. The extraction of a lumped-element, equivalent circuit model for via interconnections in 3-D packages using a single via structure with embedded capacitor [2].;5. De-embedding transmission lines using a full-wave EM-simulated pad model [3].;6. Design of a low-power and low-voltage X-band SiGe HBT low-noise amplifier (LNA) [4].;7. Design of an X-band to Ka-band single-pole double-throw (SPDT) switch [5].;8. Investigation of packaging effects of multiple X-band SiGe LNAs embedded in an organic LCP substrate [6].;9. Design of a novel Modified Wilkinson power combiner [6].