Design Of Silicon-based Millimeter-wave Low Noise Amplifier And Mixer

With the rapid development of wireless communication technology,the requirement of a large amount of data throughput being more and more urgent.Large data throughput means high transmission rate,according to Shannon Theorem,with the improvement of the system transmission rate,system transmission bandwidth will become wider.Millimeter-wave band has rich spectrum resources and wide available bandwidth.As a result,millimeter-wave circuits and systems attract more and more attention of the researchers worldwide.In addition,with the development of silicon process,feature size of silicon integrated circuit continues to decrease,the cut-off frequency(fT)and maximum oscillation frequency(fmax)of siliconbased active device gradually into the terahertz frequencies,which lay the process foundation for the research of millimeter-wave and terahertz-wave circuits and systems.In this thesis,based on CMOS process,the author focuses on the key circuits of receiver RF front-end: low noise amplifier(LNA)and mixer in millimeter-wave band.The author introduces the research status of silicon-based millimeter-wave circuits,analyses several receiver structure as well as the theories of low noise amplifier and mixer at the beginning of the thesis.Through the investigation and research,the author determines the architecture of the 60 GHz and 280 GHz silicon-based millimeter-wave receiver.Morever,the thesis further discusses how to achieve a 60 GHz wideband LNA which used in 60 GHz receiver structure,and how to design the 280 GHz Sub-Harmonic mixer.The main research and contributes are listed as follows:(1)The link modeling and simulation of the 60 GHz and 280 GHz silicon-based millimeter-wave receiver architectures verifies the feasibility of the two architectures and determines the performance of the receiver module,which provides the basis for designing 60 GHz broadband low noise amplifier and 280 GHz mixer.(2)In order to meet the need of broadband system,a wideband LNA used in 60 GHz receiver has been desiged,the LNA achieves bandwidth without sacrificing of gain and noise figure.Based on SMIC 40 nm CMOS process,the LNA adopts 3-stage cascade structure.The first stage of the proposed LNA adopts cascode amplifier with a common-drain feedback to realize broadband and noise canceling.The capacitive cross-coupling(CCC)neutralization technology is used in the second and third stages to obtain high gain and reverse isolation.Passive transformers are used for interstage coupling,DC power supply and broadening bandwidth.Post Simulated results show that the LNA achieves 21 dB gain,6.16 dB noise figure(NF)and-8.95 dBm IIP3 at 60 GHz.The 3-dB bandwidth is 25 GHz from 45 GHz to 70 GHz,while the NF is less than 7.75 dB over the entire band.(3)For the 280 GHz receiver whose working frequency is higher than the fmax of the active device,the author designed a passive mixer based on Global Foundries 65 nm CMOS process.Post simulated results show that the 3dB IF wideband of the mixer is 5GHz,the conversion loss is from 24.8dB to 27.5dB,and the noise figure is less than 24.76 dB.The mixer achieves the smallest NF when the IF output is 4GHz,the smallest NF is 20.13 dB.Compared with the current research,the proposed mixer achieves a lowest NF while having a comparable conversion loss in such frequency band.