Research On Amplitude And Phase Control In Silicon-based Rf And Millimeter-wave Integrated Circuits

With the development of wireless communications,phased-array system is widely utilized.Benefited from the high integration and low cost of the si-substrate integrated circuits,the si-substrate technology has been widely used for communications.In this dissertation,the radio-frequency and millimeter-wave phase shifter and variable gain amplifier in phased-array systems are deeply researched.The contents are divided into five parts shown as follow.1.The research of the impact of phase and amplitude errors on beam-forming.Firstly,utilizing one-dimensional uniformly distributed linear antenna array,the mechanism of beam-forming and the calculation methods are presented.Secondly,the source of phase and amplitude errors in phased arrays is studied,especially the phase and amplitude error resulted from phase shifter and variable gain amplifier.Finally,the influence of phase and amplitude errors on beam-forming is verified by Matlab simulation.The parameters of phased arrays,such as the number of element,the gain control step and phase control resolution,can be designed based on the simulation results.2.The research of broadband and low phase variation variable gain amplifier.The active cross-coupling phase compensation technique is proposed to achieve low phase variation with wide bandwidth in CMOS technology.Based on the design method and65 nm CMOS process,a variable gain amplifier with 3-d B bandwidth of 20?43 GHz and peak gain of 15.2 d B is achieved.The measured gain tuning range is 23 d B.In20?36 GHz,the measured phase variation is less than 2°.In 20?43 GHz,the maximum phase variation is less than 6°.3.The research of robust digitally-controlled variable gain amplifier.In order to increase the range of operation temperature and supply voltage,a novel gain control technique is proposed.Based on the proposed gain control technique and 180 nm CMOS process,a digitally-controlled variable gain amplifier is achieved.The variable gain amplifier has 3-d B bandwidth of 8.5?11.6 GHz and peak gain of 8 d B.The gain tuning range is 15 d B and the gain step is 1 d B.With temperature of-25?110 °C and supply voltage of 1.6?2.0 V,the RMS of gain control error is less than 0.7 d B,while the RMS phase error is less than 1.7°.4.The research of vector-sum phase shifter with low phase error.The half-quadrature phase control technique and effective phase optimization method are proposed to achieve low phase error,while the complexity of phase measurement and optimization are substantially reduced.Based on the proposed design method and 180 nm CMOS process,a 6-bit vector-sum phase shifter is presented.The phase shifter has3-d B bandwidth of 13.4?15.5 GHz and peak gain of 3.8 d B.Only 64 different phase states are measured,and the optimized RMS phase error is less than 2.3°.5.The research of high resolution variable gain phase shifter.In order to improve the phase control accuracy,the linear phase control technique is proposed.And in order to achieve variable gain control without extra gain control block,the orthogonal phase and gain control technique is proposed.Based on the proposed design techniques and 65 nm CMOS process,a 6-bit vector-sum phase shifter with 14.8 d B gain tuning range is achieved.The phase shifter has 3-d B bandwidth of 52?64 GHz.With the operation temperature of-25?110 °C and supply voltage of 1.0?1.2 V,the measured RMS phase error is less than 3.3° and the RMS gain error is less than 0.5 d B.