Integrated Transceivers for Millimeter Wave and Cellular Communication

Abstract:This doctoral thesis is addresses two topics in integrated circuit design: multiband direct conversion cellular receivers for cellular frequencies and beam steering transmitters for millimeter wave communication for the cellular backhaul. The trend towards cellular terminals supporting ever more different frequency bands has resulted in complex radio frontends with a large number of RF inputs. Common receivers have, for performance reasons, in the past used differential RF inputs. However, as shown in the thesis, with novel design techniques it is possible to achieve adequate performance with a single ended frontend architecture, thereby reducing the complexity and pin-count. Millimeter wave integrated circuits development has previously not been subject to the mass production requirements that have been put on chip sets for cellular terminals, i.e. a minimum number of circuits, low supply voltage and power consumption, together with programmability to handle process spread and performance fine tuning. However, in the near future, when 5G networks will be deployed and the number of small pico- and femtocell base stations will explode, there will be a strong demand for low cost and high performance single-chip millimeter wave beam steering transceivers. The millimeter wave circuits presented in this work have been designed in a SiGe bipolar technology. Traditionally, SiGe designs use a higher supply voltage compared to CMOS. In this work, however, it has been shown that millimeter wave transceivers can be designed using a low supply voltage, thereby reducing the power consumption and eliminating the need for dedicated voltage regulators.Paper I presents a 28 GHz QVCO with an I/Q phase error tuning and detection. In paper II a 28 GHz beam steering PLL is presented together with measurement results for the design in paper I. Measurement results for the beam steering PLL are shown in paper III. Simulation results for a two-stage 81-86 GHz power amplifier are provided in paper IV. Paper V shows measurement results for two E-band power amplifiers. In paper VI, simulation results are presented for a complete E-band transmitter including a three-stage power amplifier. A reconfigurable single-ended CMOS LNA for different cellular frequency bands is presented in paper VII. A single-ended multiband RF-amplifier and mixer with DC-offset and second order distortion suppression in BiCMOS technology is presented in paper VIII