Research And Design Of Key Block Circuits For Wideband Wireless RF Receiver Front-end

Over several decades,the developments of modern wireless communications are continually booming.Different standards and systems have gained considerable interest.Those standards and techniques broaden the distance,change the methods and improve the efficiency of communication at a fabulous rate.In order to fulfill the requirements of speed,multiple standards,compatibility,and portability for the modern RF wireless communication systems,ultra-wideband design becomes one of the most important research directions and trends.Moreover,with the development of IC fabrication technology,many novel processes such as GaAs pHEMT,CMOS,SOI-CMOS,and GaN offer great flexibility for the IC design.Based on the process of GaAs pHEMT and standard CMOS,this thesis presents the design and research of the two key building block circuits(LNA and mixer)for the wireless RF receiver front-end(RFFE).The simulation,testing,and verification are also carried out.Before the chip design,in order to make sure the pdk simulation results can perfectly match the real performance of RF circuits,different test structures for the active/passive components in the pdk have been designed.The major work of this thesis is stated as follow:1.For the LNA design,an inductorless broadband two-stage GaAs pHEMT MMIC LNA is presented.By employing multiple resistive feedback topology and source degeneration,the proposed LNA achieves flat gain and good input/output matching simultaneously.At the DC path,the feedback topology functions as the bias structure,making transistors biased in the optimized conditions.The size of the core was minimized to 0.48 mm2 by employing no on-chip inductor design.A prototype is fabricated in 0.15-?m GaAs pHEMT MMIC process.From probe measurements,the LNA features 10 MHz to 8 GHz bandwidth with S11/S22 better than-10 dB,23.310.2 dB gain,1.8 dBm best IIP3 and 1.76 dB minimum NF.The total DC power is 31 mA from the 2-V supply.2.For the mixer design,a wideband active RF mixer with a digital assist(DA)is presented.It employs a novel common gate gm-stage with multiple feedback,double-balanced Gilbert-type switches and active loads to form stacking topology.The conversion gain boost factor and input-match compensation factor can be controlled by DA.Theory and simulation results show that DA broadens the RF bandwidth of the proposed mixer and improves the conversion gain flatness.A prototype of the presented mixer is designed and fabricated in the 40-nm CMOS process,the active area is just 0.03 mm2.From COB measurment results,the proposed mixer achieves conversion gain of 7.5 dB,10.0 dB,and 12.5 dB from 0.5 to 3.5 GHz with 0.3 dB inband ripple.The best IIP3 is 1.5 dBm.The minimum SSB NF is 11.3 dB.The average DC power is only 3.2 mW from a 1.1 V supply.