Design of a high power OOK modulator and verification of circuits in 60GHz SiGe BiCMOS

Abstract

In this thesis, components for the UiB 60 GHz system are verified numerically and an on-off-keying (OOK) modulator is designed. Presence of mass in particle detector systems decrease the accuracy measuring the particle paths. This is a problem e.g. in the ALICE and ATLAS experiments. The detector systems are also highly complex, and difficult to construct. For reducing the mass and the construction complexity of particle detector systems, wireless data transfer for the sensors is proposed by WADAPT. The Microelectronics group at the University of Bergen (UiB/UoB) is working on the development of a low-power 60 GHz transceiver chip for this purpose. A previous system design exists, suggested by H.K. Soltveit, using a heterodyne receiver. This thesis suggests that a small improvement of power consumption can be achieved with a homodyne receiver scheme A previously designed three-stage LNA for 60 GHz with ≥ 9 GHz bandwidth and ≤ 4.5 dB noise figure is verified and adjusted with electromagnetic simulation and yield analysis, to meet the performance requirements of 20 dB gain and ≤ 12 mW power consumption. A previously designed three-stage PA with ≤ 30 mW power consumption, +5 dBm power output and ≥ 15 % power-added efficiency for the amplification of OOK modulated signals is verified and analyzed with electromagnetic simulations, corner analysis and bias tuning. A possibly novel OOK modulator is presented with ≤ 40 mW power consumption, 11 Gbps maximum data rate and 56 dB simulated CNR. Using a single-ended threestage switched-common-emitter topology where the speed of the switching is increased by switching the transconductance of the HBTs while in the forward-active mode of operation.