| The enormous potential of the wireless communications market, the low level of integration of current transceiver implementations, and the rapid advance of low-cost silicon processing technologies, have contributed to the renewed interest in radio-frequency (RF) circuit design in the last decade. Active silicon transistors have reached a sufficiently high level of performance so as to enable the viability of a ‘radio-on-a-chip’. There still remain challenges to achieving that goal. This thesis focuses on the transmit-receive (T/R) switch, which is one transceiver block which has defied integration so far.; Modern RF transceiver architectures commonly use a T/R switch to share the use of resources such an antenna. Although Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor-Field-Effect-Transistor characteristics as a switch have dramatically improved over the years, its performance still falls short of the specifications needed in an RF transceiver. This thesis introduces an inductive substrate bias technique that enables the design of T/R switches in a standard silicon complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor process This thesis proposes and analyzes the inductive substrate bias technique which is critical to the performance of the T/R switch. Measurements of the prototype reveal that the switch does meet the targeted specifications. |
