Abstract:
Since the early 1990’s, Silicon-Germanium heterojunction bipolar transistors revolutionized the way we build microwave and millimeter wave systems. Rivaling the once-dominant group III-V semiconductor devices in terms of speed, SiGe technologies also harness the maturity, yield and resulting complexity of Silicon based technology.

The presentation will discuss this trend using examples from the author’s research in recent years.The first example will show how a very inexpensive and „old“ SiGe HBT technology (0.8 μm feature size) was used to implement efficient impulse radio ultra-wideband (I-UWB) sensors for vital signdetection and object tracking.The second example, taken from a recently concluded major European research project, discusses how RF-MEMS components were included in a state-of-the-art Si/SiGe BiCMOS process to realize band-switchable millimeter-wave ICs, and finally a complex integrated circuit which introduces active phase and amplitude control to a reflect array antenna. The IC contains four reversible T/R modules, digital to analog converters offering eight-bit control, anda joint I2C control interface.The final example is taken from an on-going large European research project and shows how advanced Si/SiGe BiCMOS processes (130 nm feature size) can be used to establish a front-end for a 140 GHz MIMO radar system intended for security scanning of baggage. The presentation will include proof-of-concept sensing experiments, while the full MIMO radar system is the object of on-going research work.

Speaker Bio:
Hermann Schumacher received the doctorate degree in engineering (Dr.-Ing.) from RWTH Aachen, Aachen, Germany in 1986. From 1986 to 1990, he was with Bellcore, Red Bank, NJ. He then joined the School of Engineering and Computer Engineering, Ulm University, Ulm, Germany, as a Professor. He is currently the Director of the Institute of Electron Devices and Circuits, and the Director of the Communications Technology international M.Sc. program.

His research interests range from compound semiconductor devices for microwave and millimeter-wave applications to high-frequency microsystems, including low-cost millimeter-wave communication solutions and impulse-radio UWB techniques for biomedical sensing. He is the co-author of “High-Speed Electronics and Optoelectronics: Devices and Circuits” from Cambridge Press. He has authored/co-authored over 300 scientific papers in this field, and his students have won several best paper and industry awards over the years.