Dong Jingjing

Epitaxial growth of ZnO on GaN/sapphire substrate by radio-frequency magnetron sputtering

Zinc oxide (ZnO) thin films were grown on n-GaN/sapphire substrates by radio-frequency (RF) magnetron sputtering. The films were grown at substrate temperatures ranging from 400 to 700 ?C for 1 h at a RF power of 80 W in pure Ar gas ambient. The effect of the substrate temperature on the structural and optical properties of these films was investigated by X-ray diffraction (XRD), atomic force microscopy (AFM) and photoluminescence (PL) spectra. XRD results indicated that ZnO films exhibited wurtzite symmetry and c-axis orientation when grown epitaxially on n-GaN/sapphire. The best crystalline quality of the ZnO film is obtained at a growth temperature of 600 ?C. AFM results indicate that the growth mode and degree of epitaxy strongly depend on the substrate temperature. In PL measurement, the intensity of ultraviolet emission increased initially with the rise of the substrate temperature, and then decreased with the temperature. The highest UV intensity is obtained for the film grown at 600 ?C with best crystallization.

A wide range sigma—delta fractional-N frequency synthesizer with adaptive frequency calibration

A wide range fractional-N frequency synthesizer in 0.18 μm RF CMOS technology is implemented. A switched-capacitors bank LC-tank VCO and an adaptive frequency calibration technique are used to expand the frequency range. A 16-bit third-order sigma—delta modulator with dither is used to randomize the fractional spur. The active area is 0.6 mm2. The experimental results show the proposed frequency synthesizer consumes 4.3 mA from a single 1.8 V supply voltage except for buffers. The frequency range is 1.44–2.11 GHz and the frequency resolution is less than 0.4 kHz. The phase noise is −94 dBc/Hz @ 100 kHz and −121 dBc/Hz @ 1 MHz at the output of the prescaler with a loop bandwidth of approximately 120 kHz. The performance meets the requirements for the multi-band and multi-mode transceiver applications.