Abstract
This thesis presents two RF front-end receivers in 0.18 um BiCMOS for Ku-band (10.7~13.45GHz) and Ka-band (18.2~22.2GHz) applications, respectively. This thesis discusses the wideband low-noise receiver for low-noise block design regarding the circuit designs, simulations and measurements. The circuit topologies include three parts about low-noise amplifier (LNA), down conversion mixer and intermediate frequency amplifier respectively (IFA). For Ku-band applications, the input matching network of LNA is designed by transformer to achieve wideband matching and low noise operation simultaneously. The mixer of frond-end receiver used the improved Gilbert-based mixer with a passive balun to accomplish single-ended to differential conversion between the transconductance stage and switch stage. It achieves low noise and low power consumption. Next stage uses the active current mirror circuit to convert differential to single-ended and also uses capacitor degeneration technique to enhance the overall bandwidth. Last stage, IFA, uses gm3 compensation technique and 3D inductor to increase the bandwidth and linearity. For Ka-band application, the design of intermediate frequency part is similar with our previous work at Ku-band. For LNA circuit, the gate-to-source transformer feedback matching network with external capacitor CEXT is used to achieve the wideband power matching and reduce the noise figure. The mixer of receiver front-end uses the Gm-boosted current bleeding structure to improve gain and noise performance. Both RF front-ended receivers achieve conversion gain of 45dB, the noise figure is smaller than 7dB and the linearity OP1dB is above 4dBm. In addition, this thesis also presents a wideband transformer-based power amplifier in 90-nm CMOS process for C-band (4~8GHz) applications. By utilizing a two-stage cascade structure, the high gain performance can be obtained. The circuit schematic consists of a driver stage, a power stage, and three matching network by transformer at the input, interstage, and output for matching the maximum power matching impedances of the power and driver stage. The PA achieves a 3-dB bandwidth in a range of 4~8GHz, gain about 30dB, OP1-dB of 14dBm and power-added-efficiency of 20%.