| The increasing demand for portable communications equipment has driven companies to produce transceivers at lower cost. This has led to an intense interest in integrating as many components as possible. One high-speed component that has been particularly hard to integrate with acceptable noise performance is the VCO. This is largely due to the poor quality of on-chip passive components in Si IC technologies.;In this thesis, a technique has been developed to add high Q inductors to conventional silicon integrated circuits as a post-processing step. Plating copper over a low k dielectric layer of polyimide forms the inductors. Inductors with a peak Q as high as 17 at a frequency of 2 GHz have been fabricated.;A design methodology for completely integrated voltage controlled oscillators (VCOs) was also presented. Preliminary VCOs using standard on-chip inductors have a phase noise performance of -103dBc/Hz at 100kHz offset from a 1.9GHz carrier and -94dBc/Hz at 100kHz offset from a 4.7GHz carrier. The results for the 2GHz circuit fall short of meeting the GSM standard for cellular applications of -107dBc/Hz at 100kHz offset by only 4dB.;Finally, some versions of the VCOs were integrated with an on-chip LNA, image reject filter, and mixer to form a completely integrated 2GHz front-end receiver. The receiver has 25dB of conversion gain, a 4.5 dB noise figure and uses 100mW of power from a 3V supply. |
