Title:  Millimeter-Wave Silicon-Germaniun Transceiver Components for Next Generation Communications and Radar

Committee: 

Dr. Cressler, Advisor     

Dr. Scott, Chair

Dr. Shaolan Li

Abstract: The objective of the proposed research is to overcome the circuit design challenges posed at millimeter wave frequencies with designs utilizing novel techniques to compensate for the greater atmospheric attenuation and lower available gain and output power of transistors at frequencies close to fT. The higher data rates offered by millimeter wave frequencies will serve beneficial to virtually any application including but not limited to communications and radar, so in order to support these applications, functional RF circuits at millimeter-wave frequencies must be realized. In this research, the specific circuit design challenges that exist at millimeter wave are presented as strict tradeoffs between power consumption, die area, gain, bandwidth and noise figure, and novel circuit techniques are explored and introduced to address the challenges of design at millimeter wave frequencies. An asymmetric broadside coupled line D-Band LNA that exhibits wide bandwidth and low power consumption is presented. A subharmonic D-Band Mixer that achieves moderate conversion gain over a wide bandwidth is demonstrated, and a 94 GHz Self Interference Cancellation (SIC) architecture is presented utilizing a reflective-type phase shifter (RTPS) with a novel phase inverter. To confirm the advantage of the ideas, the simulation and where possible, measurement, results of all fabricated circuits are presented and discussed.