Design of Miniaturized On-Chip Passive Circuits in Silicon-Based Technology for 5G Communications

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.In any given wireless communication system, RF filter is an indispensable device. This is especially true for RF front-end module, which is designed to perform the process of selecting frequency band for different RF signals, and to reduce the spurious items in the transmitter and receiver chain and interference signals outside the whole transceiver system. As far as on-chip filtering solutions are concerned, the recent solutions are mainly focusing on two different types of semiconductor process, namely gallium arsenide (GaAs), and silicon-based process, such as CMOS, and silicon germanium (SiGe). In this work, some fundamental design challenges, especially device miniaturization, will be fully addressed through some novel design methodologies. To address the low-cost requirements for both prototyping and mass production, the silicon-based technology is used. As a result, the designs presented in this thesis may be suitable for some high-performance on-chip transceiver systems. In this thesis, design of miniaturized on-chip passive filters in silicon-based technology will be presented. Both band-stop filters and band-pass filters are implemented and charactierised at mm-wave frequency region. Three unique design approaches are presented