Matthew A. Morton

A Silicon-Germanium Receiver for X-Band Transmit/Receive Radar Modules

This work investigates the potential of commercially-available silicon-germanium (SiGe) BiCMOS technology for X-band transmit/receive (T/R) radar modules, focusing on the receiver section of the module. A 5-bit receiver operating from 8 to 10.7 GHz is presented, demonstrating a gain of 11 dB, and average noise figure of 4.1 dB, and an input-referred third-order intercept point (HP3) of -13 dBm, while only dissipating 33 mW of power. The receiver is capable of providing 32 distinct phase states from 0 to 360deg, with an rms phase error < 9deg and an rms gain error < 0.6 dB. This level of circuit performance and integration capability demonstrates the benefits of SiGe BiCMOS technology for emerging radar applications, making it an excellent candidate for integrated X-band phased-array radar transmit/receive modules.

X-Band +24 dBm CMOS power amplifier with transformer power combining

A monolithic 10 GHz CMOS power amplifier has been demonstrated in a 0.18 µm commercially available CMOS process. The design utilizes on-chip transformer based power combining to achieve a saturated output power of 24.5 dBm at 10 GHz, with a power added efficiency of 18%. The circuit has a small signal gain of 25 dB, with a 3 dB bandwidth from 8.6 to 10.3 GHz. The circuit operates off of a 3.0V supply and can deliver > 21 dBm of power over an 8 – 11 GHz bandwidth.

A Generally Applicable Calibration Algorithm for Digitally Reconfigurable Self-Healing RFICs

A generally applicable calibration technique for digitally reconfigurable self-healing radio frequency integrated circuits based on a hybrid of the Nelder-Mead and Hooke-Jeeves direct search algorithms is presented. The proposed algorithm is applied to the multiobjective problem of gain error and phase error minimization for a self-healing phase rotator test case. For the 8-D phase rotator calibration problem, we show that the proposed hybrid Nelder-Mead and Hooke-Jeeves calibration algorithm is capable of reducing the gain error and phase error of the phase rotator output to less than a maximum of 0.5 dB and 2°, respectively, relative to the chosen gain and phase targets. A 3-GHz self-healing phase rotator test chip was fabricated in a 45-nm silicon-on-insulator CMOS process, and the measured data were obtained to validate the performance of the proposed calibration algorithm.

A HBT-based 300 MHz-12 GHz blocker-tolerant mixer-first receiver

A 300 MHz-12 GHz HBT-based mixer-first receiver in 130 nm BiCMOS is presented. The mixer core is composed of four SiGe HBTs driven by quadrature LO pulses with a shared emitter RF input and feedback from the baseband to HBT bases to generate baseband-to-RF impedance-transparency. This is analogous to effects seen in CMOS passive-mixer-first receivers, but at higher frequencies than attainable with traditional CMOS topologies. LO circuitry is also implemented in emitter-coupled logic to generate 25% duty-cycle LO pulses capable of driving the high frequency mixer, which achieves a measured out-of-band 1 dB compression point of+10dBm at 9 GHz.