Design of a 60 GHz VCO Hybrid Microstrip Resonator in a 0.13-µm Sige process

Abstract

Augmented reality, 4K television and video gaming. These are just some examples were the wireless products lacks performance in terms of multi-gigabit data transfers. A solution to this challenge is the 60 GHz band. The 60 GHz band is able to support high data rates, ranging from 2-20 Gbps with bit-error rate less than 10^−12 [36, 8, 37, 19, 5]. A proposal for a transceiver chip, supporting data rates above 5 Gbps has been designed here at the University of Bergen. For this thesis a Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO), with a fundamental oscillating frequency of 61.5 GHz has been designed and verified with EM-structures and corner analysis. Simulation results for the VCO yields, -79 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz Offset Single Sideband phase noise (SSB), 19.5 mW Total Power Dissipation (TPD), -10 dBm Output Power (Ps) and 2.5 GHz tuning range. The VCO is classified as a single ended Hybrid Microstrip Resonator. To our knowledge, this oscillator has never been designed at frequencies this high. The applied design technique is a open-loop cascade, 2-port method. This method along with Leeson’s Phase Noise formula for the open-loop cascade [11] was used to develop a 9-Step-Method. This method shows how to calculate SSB, loaded Q, Output Power and Gain Margin based on the open-loop cascade. It was then used to exhibit a thorough analysis of the npn13p transistor with various types of resonator setups. The npn13p is a heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) which is provided by the 0.13 µm SiGe BiCMOS process from IHP (SG13s). It has a high f_t of 250 GHz which makes them ideal for operating in the V-band. All critical components and microstrip lines where build using EM-structures to validate results. The VCO was also verified in all corners, sweeping the temperature from 0 − 140◦C. A total of 0.17 mVrms with white noise was also added to the supply voltage nodes. Simulation results from the corner analysis showed that the VCO had a maximum SSB of -75 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz Offset below 100◦C.