Fully-integrated ultra-wide band LNA in 0.18μm CMOS technology for 3-10 GHz applications

The paper presents a fully integrated ultra-wide band(UWB) low noise amplifier(LNA) for 3-10 GHz applications. It employs self-biased resistive-feedback and current-reused technique to achieve wide input matching and low power characteristics. An improved biased architecture is adopted in the second stage to attain a better gain-compensation performance. The design is verified with TSMC standard 1 P6 M 0.18 μm RF CMOS process. The measurement results show that the parasitic problem of the transistors at high frequencies is solved. A high and flat S_(21) of 9.7±1.5 dB and the lowest NF 3.5 dB are achieved in the desired frequency band. The power consumption is only 7.5 mA under 1.6 V supply. The proposed LNA achieves broadband flat gain, low noise, and high linearity performance simultaneously, allowing it to be used in 3-10 GHz UWB applications.     

Noise and linearity optimization methods for a 1.9GHz low noise amplifier

Noise and linearity performances are critical characteristics for radio frequency integrated circuits( RFICs), especially for low noise amplifiers (LNAs) . In this paper, a detailed analysis of noise and lineaxity for the cascode architecture, a widely used circuit structure in LNA designs, is presented. The noise and the hnearity improvement techniques for cascode structures are also developed and have been proven by computer simulating experiments. Theoretical analysis and simulation results showed that, for cascode structure LNAs,the first metallic oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET) dominates the noise performance of the LNA, while the second MOSFET contributes more to the linearity. A conclusion is thus obtained that the first and second MOSFET of the LNA can be designed to optimize the noise performance and the hnearity performance separately, without trade-offs. The 1 .9 GHz Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) LNA simulation results are also given as an application of the developed theory.     

A compact and reconfigurable low noise amplifier employing combinational active inductors and composite resistors feedback techniques

A compact and reconfigurable low noise amplifier(LNA) is proposed by combining an input transistor,composite transistors with Darlington configuration as the amplification and output transistor,T-type structure composite resistors instead of a simplex structure resistor,a shunt inductor feedback realized by a tunable active inductor(AI),a shunt inductor peaking technique realized by another tunable AI.The division and collaboration among different resistances in the T-type structure composite resistor realize simultaneously input impedance matching,output impedance matching and good noise performance;the shunt feedback and peaking technique using two tunable AIs not only extend frequency bandwidth and improve gain flatness,but also make the gain and frequency band can be tuned simultaneously by the external bias of tunable AIs;the Darlington configuration of composite transistors provides high gain;furthermore,the adoption of the small size AIs instead of large size passive spiral inductor,and the use of composite resistors make the LNA have a small size.The LNA is fabricated and verified by GaAs/InGaP hetero-junction bipolar transistor(HBT) process.The results show that at the frequency of 7 GHz,the gain S_(21) is maximum and up to 19 dB;the S_(21)can be tuned from 17 dB to 19 dB by tuning external bias of tunable AIs,that is,the tunable amount of S_(21) is 2 dB,and similarly at 8 GHz;the tunable range of 3 dB bandwidth is 1 GHz.In addition,the gain S_(21) flatness is better than 0.4 dB under frequency from 3.1 GHz to 10.6 GHz;the size of the LNA only has 760 μm × 1260 μm(including PADs).Therefore,the proposed strategies in the paper provide a new solution to the design of small size and reconfigurable ultra-wideband(UWB)LNA and can be used further to adjust the variations of gain and bandwidth of radio frequency integrated circuits(RFICs) due to package,parasitic and the variation of fabrication process and temperature.     

Development of cryogenically-cooled low noise amplifier for mobile base station receivers

A new circuit model for designing and manufacturing an S-band low noise amplifier(LNA) with the software,Advanced Design System(ADS),is introduced in this paper.The proposed model involves shunted impedance at the grid to achieve a stable LNA without measuring the S-parameters of transistors at low temperatures.The LNA was measured over the operation band of 2.2-2.3 GHz,which has input and output standing wave ratios below 1.2.The noise figure of the manufactured LNA was about 0.2 dB and the gain was above 22 dB,which indicated that our LNA worked well at 77 K.     

Open-air traveling-wave thermoacoustic generator

Taking the input and reflected waves into account,the relationship between the acoustic impedance at the end and the input of a system were theoretically analyzed.Closed and open acoustic configurations that influence the pressure,volumetric velocity,impedance and acoustic work were compared in detail.Based on the above investigation,an open-air traveling-wave thermoacoustic generator was designed and fabricated.It is composed of a looped tube,a resonator open at one end,a regenerator,and hot and cold heat exchangers.It is a small scale and simple configuration.The resonant frequency is 74 Hz at 1 bar in air.The maximum acoustic pressures at the open end and 0.5 m far away from the open end are 133.4 dB and 101 dB from a reference value of 20μPa when the heating power was 210 W,respectively.Acoustic pressure is reasonable for practical application as a low-frequency acoustic source.In further work,we believe that the acoustic pressure at the open end can achieve 150 dB,which could be a solution to problems in existing acoustic generators.These problems include low acoustic pressure and system complexity.It can be used as a basic acoustic source for low frequency and long-range noise experiments,and as a supply for high acoustic pressures necessary for industrial sources.     

A tunable passive mixer for SAW-less front-end with reconfigurable voltage conversion gain and intermediate frequency bandwidth

An adjustable mixer for surface acoustic wave( SAW)-less radio frequency( RF) front-end is presented in this paper. Through changing the bias voltage,the presented mixer with reconfigurable voltage conversion gain( VCG) is suitable for multi-mode multi-standard( MMMS) applications. An equivalent local oscillator( LO) frequency-tunable high-Q band-pass filter( BPF) at low noise amplifier( LNA) output is used to reject the out-of-band interference signals. Base-band( BB) capacitor of the mixer is variable to obtain 15 kinds of intermediate frequency( IF) bandwidth( BW). The proposed passive mixer with LNA is implemented in TSMC 0. 18μm RF CMOS process and operates from 0. 5 to 2. 5 GHz with measured maximum out-of-band rejection larger than 40 d B. The measured VCG of the front-end can be changed from 5 to 17 d B; the maximum input intercept point( IIP3) is0 d Bm and the minimum noise figure( NF) is 3. 7 d B. The chip occupies an area of 0. 44 mm~2 including pads.     

A low power quadrature up-conversion mixer for WSN application

This paper presents an up-conversion mixer for 2.4GHz wireless sensor networks in 0. 181xm RF complementary metal-oxide semiconductor （CMOS） technology. It is based on a double-balanced Gilbert cell type. With two Gilbert cells it was applied quadrature modulation. Operational ampli- tiers are used in this design to improve the conversion gain under low power consumption. The mixer design is based on 0.18txm RF CMOS process. And the mixer test results indicate that under 1.8V power supply, with input frequency 2.4 - 2.4835GHz, the conversion voltage gain is 1.2 - 2dB. When the output frequency is 2.4GHz, its power gain is -4.46dB, and its input referred 1 dB com- pression point is -11.5dBm and it consumes 1.77mA current.     

UHF power amplifier design in 0.35μm SiGe BiCMOS

A two-stage power amplifier operated at 925 MHz was designed and fabricated in Jazz' s 0.35μm SiGe BiCMOS process.It was fully integrated excluding the inductors and the output matching network. Under a single 3.3V supply voltage,the off-chip bonding test results indicated that the circuit has a small signal gain of more than 24dB,the input and output reflectance are less than- 24dB and-10dB,re- spectively,and the maximal output power is 23.5 dBm.At output power of 23.1 dBm,the PAE(power added efficiency)is...     

Microwave absorbing properties of polyaniline/montmorillonite doped with dodecylbenzensulfonic acid nanocomposite

In this paper, we reported a new type of high performance microwave-absorbing material, polyaniline/montmorillonite doped with dodecylbenzensulfonic acid (PAni-DBSA/MMT) nanocomposite. The microwave-absorbing properties of this nanocomposite were investigated for the frist time. The nanocomposites were synthesized from emulsion polymerization using dodecylbenzensulfonic acid (DBSA) as dopant and emulsifier. The structure of the nanocomposite was analyzed by X-ray diffraction(XRD) and FT-IR, and its results denoted that PAni-DBSA/MMT is a typical intercalative polymer/layered silicate(PLS) nanocomposite, and the interaction between MMT layers and PAni chains enhances the delocalization of free electrons in PAni chains. The complex permittivity, permeability and reflection loss (R.L.) of microwave of a 2.00 mm thick samples containing 50% by weight of PAni-DBSA/MMT nanocomposite and PANI?DBSA were measured, respectively, in 2?18 GHz range. The results showed that the PANI-DBSA/MMT nanocomposite is capable of absorbing 2.0?18 GHz microwaves, and the reflection loss was less than -10 dB in the frequency range of 9.1?12.5 GHz, while the minimum reflection loss was -15.8 dB at 11 GHz. The microwave absorbing mechanism of nanocomposite is disscused.     

Research of the terahertz dual-band notch filter based on FSS structures

In this paper, a dual-band notch filter for two-layer frequency selective surface （FSS） at terahertz （THz） frequency with high fil- tering performance has been realized on high-resistivity silicon substrates. With periodic metallic resonators patterned on the sili- con wafer, the designed filter can provide two tunable resonant frequencies for terahertz application. The transmission response was improved by introducing an extra surrounding pattern around the T-shaped structure, and the location of transmission drop was tuned independently with geometric parameters. Simulated by finite-integral time-domain method, the filter is designed to operate between 0.2 and 0.6 THz with dual-band band-stop performance, a salient feature of this design is making the low sensi- tivity of its frequency response to the incident angles, which allows to place the filter close to the radiation source with spherical wave fronts. The proposed structures were fabricated using photolithography and tested by THz time-domain spectroscopy system Experimental results show that the transmission response has more than 12 and 32 dB rejections near 285 and 460 GHz respectively, which is in good agreement with the simulation result.     

A reconfigurable active-Gm-RC filter for multistandard wireless receivers

A 4~(th)-order low-pass filter(LPF) based on active-G_m-RC structure for multi-standard system application is presented in this paper.The performances of LPF are controlled by a 1-bit controlvoltage,and the cut-off frequency,channel selectivity,and linearity of the proposed filter can be reconfigured accordingly.In order to improve the accuracy of the cut-off frequency,a binary-weighted switched-capacitor array is employed as the auto-tuning circuits to calibrate the RC-time constant.Fabricated in TSMC 0.18μm RF CMOS process,the proposed LPF achieves a measured cutoff frequency of 1.95 and 12.3MHz for WCDMA and GPS/Galileo application with a bandwidth deviation less than 4%.The measured 1dB compression points are-3.0dBm and-5.1dBm respectively for different modes.The core circuit of LPF consumes 1mW and 1.6mW for WCDMA and GPS/Galileo respectively.And the proposed LPF occupies an area of 0.78mm~2.     

Design of 15 Gb/s inductorless limiting amplifier with RSSI and LOS indication in 65nm CMOS

A limiting amplifier IC implemented in 65 nm CMOS technology and intended for high-speed optical fiber communications is described in this paper.The inductorless limiting amplifier incorporates5-stage 8 dB gain limiting cells with active feedback and negative Miller capacitance,a high speed output buffer with novel third order active feedback,and a high speed full-wave rectifier.The receiver signal strength indictor(RSSI) can detect input signal power with 33 dB dynamic range,and the limiting amplifier features a programmable loss of signal(LOS) indication with external resistor.The sensitivity of the limiting amplifier is 5.5mV at BER = 10 ~(-12) and the layout area is only 0.53 ×0.72 mm because of no passive inductor.The total gain is over 41 dB,and bandwidth exceeds12 GHz with 56 mW power dissipation.     

Trade-offs in Specific CMOS RF Communication Circuits

The design trade-off in the front-end of the transceiver,such as LNA,mixer,local oscillator and PA,is concerned. The advantages and limitations of the circuit topologies and key parameters of the state-of-the-art CMOS transceiver building blocks are discussed in order to gain more insight about a specific block design. A normalized formula of the figures of merit for each building block is also proposed to evaluate the overall performance of various circuits for fair comparison.     

Novel high PSRR current reference based on subthreshold MOSFETs

This paper takes full advantages of the I-V transconductance characteristics of metal-oxide semiconductor field effect transistor （MOSFET） operating in the subthreshold region and the enhancement pre-regulator technique with the high gain negative feedback loop. The proposed reference circuit, designed with the SMIC 0.18 μm standard complementary metal-oxide semiconductor （CMOS） logic process technology, exhibits a stable current of about 1.701 μA with much low temperature coefficient （TC） of 2.5×10^-4μA/℃ in the temperature range of-40 to 150℃ at 1.5 V supply voltage, and also achieves a best PSRR over a broad frequency. The PSRR is about - 126 dB at DC frequency and remains -92 dB at the frequency higher 100 MHz. Moreover the proposed reference circuit operates stably at the supply voltage higher 1.2 V and has good process compatibility.     

Design and fabrication of superconducting transition edge sensor bolometers with background limited noise performance

We successfully designed and fabricated TES bolometers utilizing A1/Ti bilayer TESs as sensitive thermometers. To reduce the intrinsic noise level and tune the saturation power of a bolometer, the TES thermometer is placed on a suspended SiN platform which is thermally coupled to the heat bath by four long SiN beams with different geometries. The measurement results show that the detectors have background limited noise performance, with a low noise equivalent power （NEP） on the order of 10-17 W/HZ1/2 and have a saturation power of several tens pW at a bath temperature of 320 mK. These detectors are suitable for applications in ground-based astrophysics experiments by integrating absorbers for specific wavelengths.     

Design and implementation of instruction-driven and data-driven self-reconfigurable cell array

The reconfigurable chip, which integrates the advantages of high performance, high flexibility,high parallelism, low power consumption, and low cost, has achieved rapid development and wide application. Generally, the control part and the computing part of algorithm is accelerated based on different reconfigurable architectures, but it is difficult to obtain overall performance improvement.For improving efficiency of reconfigurable structure both for the control part and the computing part,a hyb...     

Advanced continuous phase modulation for high mobility communications

This paper focuses on the design of continuous phase-modulated systems and simplified receiver for high- mobility wireless communications. A class of spectrally efficient coded modulation systems is proposed and ana- lyzed in terms of Euclidean distance and spectral effi- ciency. Moreover, the simplified detector based on mismatched receiver is designed to reduce the detection complexity exponentially for partial response systems. To deal with the fast time-varying channels without channel state information, a class of noncoherent detection algo- rithms for continuous phase modulation systems is devel- oped to offer near-coherent performance. The proposed system is assessed over both the additive white Gaussian noise and fast-fading channels. Numerical and simulated results show that the proposed system offers not only high spectral efficiency but also near-optimum performance over fast time-varying scenarios.     

Steady-State Analysis of Target Tracker with Constant Input/Bias Constraint

Navigation and surveillance applications require tracking constant input/bias targets. When the target＇s trajectory follows a constant input/bias constraint, model mismatching caused by conventional tracking algorithms can be handled by a delayed update filter （DUF）. The statistical convergence and stability properties of the delayed update filter were studied to insure the rationality of its steady-state analysis. A steady-state filter gain was then designed for a constant-gain DUF to reduce the computations without much performance loss. Simulations demonstrate the potential of the constant-gain DUF, and the CGDUF is nearly 60% faster than the DUF without much loss in steady-state tracking accuracy.     

Simulation on Peak-to-Average Power Ratio for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing

Clipping is a simple and convenient PAPR （peak-to-average power ratio） reduction method for high speed OFDM （orthogonal frequency division multiplexing） communication system. In this paper, we propose a new PAPR reduction method for Wireless-MAN（metropolitan area network）-OFDM system based on IEEE 802.16, which is over-sampling clipping arithmetic. Simulation and performance of the over-samples clipping＇s PAPR reduction capability, BER effect is given. The simulation indicates that the PAPR of at least 99.9% OFDM symbol is below 6dB after 2 Nyquist rate clipping, and the performance of BER has 1dB SNR（signal noise ratio） loss. The results prove that this method has better capacity to reducing PAPR. So it can be well used in WMAN-OFDM system.     

Frequency invariant beamforming via jointly optimizing spatial and frequency responses

An approach to designing broadband frequency invariant beamformer based on finite impulse response (FIR) filters via jointly optimizing the spatial and frequency responses is proposed. The beam responses are jointly optimized to satisfy both spatial and frequency domain specifications by designing a bank of FIR filters corresponding to the input channels. It minimizes the maximum error between the designed beam pattern and the desired one in the mainlobe area over the working frequency band, and guarantees the sidelobes in the passband and the beam magnitude responses in the stopband to be below some given threshold values. White noise gain constraint is used to improve the robustness of the beamformer against random errors. The beam patterns are expressed as a linear function of FIR filter impulse responses, and the design problem is formulated as the second-order cone programming (SOCP), which can be solved efficiently via the well-established interior point methods. Results of computer simulation and lake-experiment for a twelve-element semicircular array demonstrate superior performance of this approach in comparison to the existing approaches.