| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation presents new circuit architectures and techniques for designing high performance microwave and millimeter-wave circuits using 0.18-µm SiGe BiCMOS process for advanced wireless communication and sensing systems.
The high performance single- and multi-band power amplifiers working in microwave and millimeter-wave frequency ranges are proposed. A 10-19, 23-39, and 33-40 GHz concurrent tri-band power amplifier in the respective Ku-, K-, and Ka-band using the distributed amplifier structure is presented first. Instead of utilizing multi-band matching networks, this amplifier is realized based on distributed amplifier structure and two active notch filters employed at each gain cell to form tri-band response. In addition, a power amplifier operating across the entire K-band is proposed. By employing lumped-element Wilkinson power divider and combiner, it produces high output power, high gain, and power added efficiency characteristics over broadband due to its inherent low-pass filtering response. Moreover, a highly integrated V-band power amplifier is presented. This power amplifier consists of four medium unit power cells combined with a four-way parallel power combining network.
Secondly, microwave and millimeter-wave power combining and dividing networks are proposed. A wideband power divider and combiner operating up to 67 GHz is developed by adopting capacitive loading slow-wave transmission line to reduce size as well as insertion loss. Also, two-way and 16-way 24/60 GHz dual-band power divider networks in the K/V-band are proposed. The two-way dual-band power divider is realized with a slow-wave transmission line and two shunt connected LC resonators in order to minimize the chip size as well as insertion loss. Furthermore, a 16-way dual-band power dividing and combining network is developed for a dual-band 24/60 GHz 4×4 array system. This network incorporates a two-way dual-band power divider, lumped-element based Wilkinson power dividers, and multi-section transmission line based Wilkinson structures.
Finally, a K-/V-band dual-band transmitter front-end is proposed. To realize the transmitter, a diplexer with good diplexing performance and K- and V-band variable gain amplifiers having low phase variation with gain tuning are designed. The transmitter is integrated with two diplexers, K- and V-band variable gain amplifiers, and two power amplifiers resulting in high gain, high output power, and low-phase variation with all gain control stages. | en |
