Research of S/C and K-band Low Noise Amplifiers and W-band Injection Locked Frequency Multiplier
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Chang, Yu-Chuan
Abstract
In recent years, the applications of microwave are widely developed in engineer-ing, especially in wireless communication. Today, high-speed communications are the focus, and the low noise amplifiers and stable sources are important in regardless of wire or wireless communication systems. This thesis is divided into two parts. The first part presents the development of low noise amplifiers for RF frond end. Low noise amplifiers are a vital element in the RF receiver front-end systems. The weak RF signals received from the antenna are amplified and import less noise in low noise amplifier. Firstly, a low noise amplifier using 0.15-μm GaAs pHEMT for SKA application is presented. By properly choosing circuit architecture, the LNA demonstrates sufficient gain, 27.5 ± 0.5 dB, and excellent noise figure, 1 ± 0.2 dB, from 2.8 to 5.12 GHz which is the SKA band-4. Also, two K-band low noise amplifiers from 17.7 to 20.7 GHz are investigated in this thesis. Both of them are fabricated in TSMC 90 nm CMOS. The topology of the first circuit is a common source stage cascade with a cascode stage. The noise perfor-mance of common source topology is better than cascode topology and it is usually the first stage at low noise amplifier. The second circuit is two-stage cascode amplifier with choosing smaller transistor size in unit amplifier cell to reduce power consump-tion and noise cancelling technique which adds inductor between the cascode compo-nents for suppressing noise and improve the stability at high frequency band. The two amplifiers have more than 15 dB gain and lower than 3-dB noise performance in the target band. The second part of the thesis is about an injection-locked frequency sextupler us-ing 65-nm CMOS for automotive radar applications. Multiplier is widely used in RF transceiver systems. Usually, the multiplier is not be implemented more than four times. For the multiple greater than four, the cascade topology is more popular. Tradi-tionally sextupler are often achieved by cascade doubler and tripler. However, the non-linear-amplifier-based frequency multiplier is a bit of large because of the low-frequency matching circuits. In this thesis, the injection-locked tripler with push-push topology is used to get the six times input frequency after the buffer stage. For the consideration of system power budget, a medium power amplifier is cascaded at the frequency sextupler. At input power 0 dBm, the locking range of this sextupler is 9.6 % and the area is 0.42 mm2 including pads.
Subjects
low noise amplifier
Multiplier
MMIC
pHEMT
CMOS
SKA
Type
thesis