An interdigital bandpass filter embedded in LTCC for 5-GHz wireless LAN applications

This letter presents a compact interdigital stripline bandpass filter embedded in low temperature cofired ceramic for 5-GHz wireless LAN applications, including design, simulation, fabrication, and measurements. The filter measures 8 mm/spl times/7 mm/spl times/1.1 mm and exhibits an insertion loss of 3.6 dB, a return loss of 20 dB, and a 212-MHz passband with the midband frequency at 5.28 GHz. The filter is highly reproducible with good tolerance. A low noise amplifier (LNA) built on the top of the LTCC substrate with an embedded filter has the same bandwidth and midband frequency as those of the filter. Using this filter and an integrated chip, a small RF front-end receiver has been achieved.     

Highly integrated 60 GHz transmitter and receiver MMICs in a GaAs pHEMT technology

Highly integrated transmitter and receiver MMICs have been designed in a commercial 0.15 /spl mu/m, 88 GHz f/sub T//183 GHz f/sub MAX/ GaAs pHEMT MMIC process and characterized on both chip and system level. These chips show the highest level of integration yet presented in the 60 GHz band and are true multipurpose front-end designs. The system operates with an LO signal in the range 7-8 GHz. This LO signal is multiplied in an integrated multiply-by-eight (X8) LO chain, resulting in an IF center frequency of 2.5 GHz. Although the chips are inherently multipurpose designs, they are especially suitable for high-speed wireless data transmission due to their very broadband IF characteristics. The single-chip transmitter MMIC consists of a balanced resistive mixer with an integrated ultra-wideband IF balun, a three-stage power amplifier, and the X8 LO chain. The X8 is a multifunction design by itself consisting of a quadrupler, a feedback amplifier, a doubler, and a buffer amplifier. The transmitter chip delivers 3.7/spl plusmn/1.5 dBm over the RF frequency range of 54-61 GHz with a peak output power of 5.2 dBm at 57 GHz. The single-chip receiver MMIC contains a three-stage low-noise amplifier, an image reject mixer with an integrated ultra-wideband IF hybrid and the same X8 as used in the transmitter chip. The receiver chip has 7.1/spl plusmn/1.5 dB gain between 55 and 63 GHz, more than 20 dB of image rejection ratio between 59.5 and 64.5 GHz, 10.5 dB of noise figure, and -11 dBm of input-referred third-order intercept point (IIP3).     

A V-band front-end with 3-D integrated cavity filters/duplexers and antenna in LTCC technologies

This paper presents a compact system-on-package-based front-end solution for 60-GHz-band wireless communication/sensor applications that consists of fully integrated three-dimensional (3-D) cavity filters/duplexers and antenna. The presented concept is applied to the design, fabrication, and testing of V-band (receiver (Rx): 59-61.5 GHz, transmitter (Tx): 61.5-64 GHz) transceiver front-end module using multilayer low-temperature co-fired ceramic technology. Vertically stacked 3-D low-loss cavity bandpass filters are developed for Rx and Tx channels to realize a fully integrated compact duplexer. Each filter exhibits excellent performance (Rx: IL<2.37 dB, 3-dB bandwidth (BW) /spl sim/3.5%, Tx: IL<2.39 dB, 3-dB BW /spl sim/3.33%). The fabrication tolerances contributing to the resonant frequency experimental downshift were investigated and taken into account in the simulations of the rest devices. The developed cavity filters are utilized to realize the compact duplexers by using microstrip T-junctions. This integrated duplexer shows Rx/Tx BW of 4.20% and 2.66% and insertion loss of 2.22 and 2.48 dB, respectively. The different experimental results of the duplexer compared to the individual filters above are attributed to the fabrication tolerance, especially on microstrip T-junctions. The measured channel-to-channel isolation is better than 35.2 dB across the Rx band (56-58.4 GHz) and better than 38.4 dB across the Tx band (59.3-60.9 GHz). The reported fully integrated Rx and Tx filters and the dual-polarized cross-shaped patch antenna functions demonstrate a novel 3-D deployment of embedded components equipped with an air cavity on the top. The excellent overall performance of the full integrated module is verified through the 10-dB BW of 2.4 GHz (/spl sim/4.18%) at 57.45 and 2.3 GHz (/spl sim/3.84%) at 59.85 GHz and the measured isolation better than 49 dB across the Rx band and better than 51.9 dB across the Tx band.     

Low-loss LTCC cavity filters using system-on-package technology at 60 GHz

In this paper, three-dimensional (3-D) integrated cavity resonators and filters consisting of via walls are demonstrated as a system-on-package compact solution for RF front-end modules at 60 GHz using low-temperature cofired ceramic (LTCC) technology. Slot excitation with a /spl lambda/g/4 open stub has been applied and evaluated in terms of experimental performance and fabrication accuracy and simplicity. The strongly coupled cavity resonator provides an insertion loss <0.84 dB, a return loss >20.6 dB over the passband (/spl sim/0.89 GHz), and a 3-dB bandwidth of approximately 1.5% (/spl sim/0.89 GHz), as well as a simple fabrication of the feeding structure (since it does not require to drill vias to implement the feeding structure). The design has been utilized to develop a 3-D low-loss three-pole bandpass filter for 60-GHz wireless local area network narrow-band (/spl sim/1 GHz) applications. This is the first demonstration entirely authenticated by measurement data for 60-GHz 3-D LTCC cavity filters. This filter exhibits an insertion loss of 2.14 dB at the center frequency of 58.7 GHz, a rejection >16.4 dB over the passband, and a 3-dB bandwidth approximately 1.38% (/spl sim/0.9 GHz).     

3-D-integrated RF and millimeter-wave functions and modules using liquid crystal polymer (LCP) system-on-package technology

Electronics packaging evolution involves system, technology, and material considerations. In this paper, we present a novel three-dimensional (3-D) integration approach for system-on-package (SOP)-based solutions for wireless communication applications. This concept is proposed for the 3-D integration of RF and millimeter (mm) wave embedded functions in front-end modules by means of stacking substrates using liquid crystal polymer (LCP) multilayer and /spl mu/BGA technologies. Characterization and modeling of high-Q RF inductors using LCP is described. A single-input-single-output (SISO) dual-band filter operating at ISM 2.4-2.5 GHz and UNII 5.15-5.85 GHz frequency bands, two dual-polarization 2/spl times/1 antenna arrays operating at 14 and 35 GHz, and a WLAN IEEE 802.11a-compliant compact module (volume of 75/spl times/35/spl times/0.2 mm/sup 3/) have been fabricated on LCP substrate, showing the great potential of the SOP approach for 3-D-integrated RF and mm wave functions and modules.     

基于LTCC技术的WLAN射频前端的研制

采用低温共烧陶瓷(LTCC)集成技术,设计和制作了具有立体化新型结构的无线局域网(WLAN)射频前端,并对制得的产品模块进行了测试。结果表明:采用LTCC技术制得的WLAN射频前端的外形尺寸仅为29 mm×18 mm×5 mm,远小于传统同类型WLAN射频前端的尺寸。在2.4～2.5 GHz的工作频率范围内,所制WLAN射频前端的最大输出功率为27 dBm,噪声系数小于1.7 dB,接收增益大于15 dB,发射增益大于20 dB。     

5-6.5 GHz LTCC power amplifier module with 0.3 W at 2.4 V in Si-bipolar

A fully integrated 5.5 /spl times/ 8.1 mm/sup 2/ low temperature cofired ceramic (LTCC) power amplifier module for 5-6.5 GHz has been realised in a 40 GHz-f/sub T/-BiCMOS technology. No external components are required. At 1 to 2.4 V supply voltages output powers of 17.5 to 24.8 dBm are achieved at 5.9 GHz. The respective power added efficiency is 28 to 36%. The small-signal gain is 23 dB.     

Near-Ballistic Uni-Traveling-Carrier Photodiode- Based V-Band Optoelectronic Mixers With Internal Up-Conversion-Gain, Wide Modulation Bandwidth, and Very High Operation Current Performance

We construct a high-performance optoelectronic mixer by integrating a near-ballistic uni-traveling-carrier photodiode with a V-band (50-75 GHz) coplanar-waveguide-based bandpass filter. The demonstrated device shows an improvement in the V-band output radio-frequency (RF) power and conversion loss of around 3 and 10 dB, respectively, over that of the control device, which does not have such an integrated filter. The strong nonlinearity of the ballistic-transport of the electrons in the active device, and the excellent RF performance of the integrated filter help us to achieve an internal-conversion gain of around 1 dB, from the low to very high optical injected local-oscillator power (20.6 dBm), which corresponds to an approximately 17-mA high-output photocurrent, and very wide up-conversion bandwidth (>15 GHz) at the V-band.     

A monolithic 3.1-4.8 GHz MB-OFDM UWB transceiver in 0.18-μm CMOS

A monolithic RF transceiver for an MB-OFDM UWB system in 3.1-4.8 GHz is presented.The transceiver adopts direct-conversion architecture and integrates all building blocks including a gain controllable wideband LNA,a I/Q merged quadrature mixer,a fifth-order Gm-C bi-quad Chebyshev LPF/VGA,a fast-settling frequency synthesizer with a poly-phase filter,a linear broadband up-conversion quadrature modulator,an active D2S converter and a variablegain power amplifier.The ESD protected transceiver is fabricated in Jazz Semiconductor's 0.18-μm RF CMOS with an area of 6.1 mm2 and draws a total current of 221 mA from 1.8-V supply.The receiver achieves a maximum voltage gain of 68 dB with a control range of 42 dB in 6 dB/Step,noise figures of 5.5-8.8 dB for three sub-bands,and an inband/out-band IIP3 better than-4 dBm/+9 dBm.The transmitter achieves an output power ranging from-10.7 to-3dBm with gain control,an output P1dB better than-7.7 dBm,a sideband rejection about 32.4 dBc,and LO suppression of 31.1 dBc.The hopping time among sub-bands is less than 2.05 ns.     

LTCC-Based Highly Integrated Millimeter-Wave Receiver Front-End Module

This paper presents the design and fabrication of a highly integrated Low Temperature Co-fired Ceramic (LTCC) receiver front-end module. This LTCC module is a dual channel receiver module, works at Ka-band, and fabricated including six Ferro A6M dielectric layers and five metal layers, contains eight embedded resistors and eight MMICs. All MMICs are mounted into pre-making cavities on the top surface of the LTCC substrate. Three slot coupled waveguide-to-microstrip transitions are integrated at LTCC substrate to realize RF and LO signal input. The developed module is highly integrated and reliable, which has a compact size of 58 × 50 × 22 mm³ (including the metal cavity). Each channel of the receiver has the noise figure of less than 9 dB and the gain of more than 24 dB at Ka-band.     

A 0.13 μm CMOS UWB RF Transmitter with an On‐Chip T/R Switch

This paper presents a fully integrated 0.13 μm CMOS MB‐OFDM UWB transmitter chain (mode 1). The proposed transmitter consists of a low‐pass filter, a variable gain amplifier, a voltage‐to‐current converter, an I/Q up‐mixer, a differential‐to‐single‐ended converter, a driver amplifier, and a transmit/receive (T/R) switch. The proposed T/R switch shows an insertion loss of less than 1.5 dB and a Tx/Rx port isolation of more than 27 dB over a 3 GHz to 5 GHz frequency range. All RF/analog circuits have been designed to achieve high linearity and wide bandwidth. The proposed transmitter is implemented using IBM 0.13 μm CMOS technology. The fabricated transmitter shows a ?3 dB bandwidth of 550 MHz at each sub‐band center frequency with gain flatness less than 1.5 dB. It also shows a power gain of 0.5 dB, a maximum output power level of 0 dBm, and output IP3 of +9.3 dBm. It consumes a total of 54 mA from a 1.5 V supply.     

3-D Integration of 10-GHz Filter and CMOS Receiver Front-End

A 10-GHz filter/receiver module is implemented in a novel 3-D integration technique suitable for RF and microwave circuits. The receiver designed and fabricated in a commercial 0.18-mum CMOS process is integrated with embedded passive components fabricated on a high-resistivity Si substrate using a recently developed self-aligned wafer-level integration technology. Integration with the filter is achieved through bonding a high-Q evanescent-mode cavity filter onto the silicon wafer using screen printable conductive epoxy. With adjustment of the input matching of the receiver integrated circuit by the embedded passives fabricated on the Si substrate, the return loss, conversion gain, and noise figure of the front-end receiver are improved. At RF frequency of 10.3 GHz and with an IF frequency of 50 MHz, the integrated front-end system achieves a conversion gain of 19 dB, and an overall noise figure of 10 dB. A fully integrated filter/receiver on an Si substrate that operates at microwave frequencies is demonstrated.     

A fully integrated 24-GHz phased-array transmitter in CMOS

This paper presents the first fully integrated 24-GHz phased-array transmitter designed using 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS transistors. The four-element array includes four on-chip CMOS power amplifiers, with outputs matched to 50 /spl Omega/, that are each capable of generating up to 14.5 dBm of output power at 24 GHz. The heterodyne transmitter has a two-step quadrature up-conversion architecture with local oscillator (LO) frequencies of 4.8 and 19.2 GHz, which are generated by an on-chip frequency synthesizer. Four-bit LO path phase shifting is implemented in each element at 19.2 GHz, and the transmitter achieves a peak-to- ratio of 23 dB with raw beam-steering resolution of 7/spl deg/ for radiation normal to the array. The transmitter can support data rates of 500 Mb/s on each channel (with BPSK modulation) and occupies 6.8 mm /spl times/ 2.1 mm of die area.     

应用于毫米波无线接收系统的高集成化LTCC AIP设计

介绍了一种基于低温共烧陶瓷工艺的新型高度集成毫米波无源接收前端,该前端由阵列天线、馈电网络和带通滤波器构成.上述无源器件以天线集成封装方式经过一体化设计,并应用于毫米波无线系统.首先,设计了2×2线极化空气腔阵列天线,通过采用新颖的内埋空气腔体结构,使天线最大增益提高了2.9 dB.其次,将具有双层谐振结构的三阶小型化发卡型带通滤波器和天线馈电网络进行一体化设计.该滤波器测试结果显示:插入损耗为1.9dB,3 dB相对带宽为8.1％(中心频率为34 GHz).最后将上述天线和滤波网络进行一体化设计,实现了三维无线接收前端.在集成结构中,通过采用金属柱栅栏抑制了寄生模式.测试结果显示天线最大增益可达14.3dB,通过集成滤波馈电网络,其阻抗带宽为2.8 GHz.该新型一体化集成前端系统具有良好的射频性能,可作为全集成无源前端应用于Ka波段无线系统中.     

应用于IEEE 802.11b无线局域网系统的2.4GHzCMOS单片收发机射频前端

实现了一个应用于IEEE 802.11b无线局域网系统的2.4GHz CMOS单片收发机射频前端,它的接收机和发射机都采用了性能优良的超外差结构.该射频前端由五个模块组成:低噪声放大器、下变频器、上变频器、末前级和LO缓冲器.除了下变频器的输出采用了开漏级输出外,各模块的输入、输出端都在片匹配到50Ω.该射频前端已经采用0.18μm CMOS工艺实现.当低噪声放大器和下变频器直接级联时,测量到的噪声系数约为5.2dB,功率增益为12.5dB,输入1dB压缩点约为-18dBm,输入三阶交调点约为-7dBm.当上变频器和末前级直接级联时,测量到的噪声系数约为12.4dB,功率增益约为23.8dB,输出1dB压缩点约为1.5dBm,输出三阶交调点约为16dBm.接收机射频前端和发射机射频前端都采用1.8V电源,消耗的电流分别为13.6和27.6mA.     

一个双频带可重构的直接变频接收机射频前端

A dual-band reconfigurable wireless receiver RF front-end is presented, which is based on the directconversion principle and consists of a low noise amplifer （LNA） and a down-converter. By utilizing a compact switchable on-chip symmetrical inductor, the RF front-end could be switched between two operation frequency bands without extra die area cost. This RF front-end has been implemented in the 180 nm CMOS process and the measured results show that the front-end could provide a gain of 25 dB and IIP3 of 6 dBm at 2.2 GHz, and a gain of 18.8 dB and IIP3 of 7.3 dBm at 4.5 GHz. The whole front-end consumes 12 mA current at 1.2 V voltage supply for the LNA and 2.1 mA current at 1.8 V for the mixer, with a die area of 1.2 × 1 mm^2.     

A single-chip dual-band tri-mode CMOS transceiver for IEEE 802.11a/b/g wireless LAN

A single-chip dual-band tri-mode CMOS transceiver that implements the RF and analog front-end for an IEEE 802.11a/b/g wireless LAN is described. The chip is implemented in a 0.25-/spl mu/m CMOS technology and occupies a total silicon area of 23 mm/sup 2/. The IC transmits 9 dBm/8 dBm error vector magnitude (EVM)-compliant output power for a 64-QAM OFDM signal. The overall receiver noise figure is 5.5/4.5 dB at 5 GHz/2.4 GHz. The phase noise is -105 dBc/Hz at a 10-kHz offset and the spurs are below -64 dBc when measured at the 5-GHz transmitter output.     

A 3.1-4.8 GHz transmitter with a high frequency divider in 0.18 μm CMOS for OFDM-UWB

A fully integrated low power RF transmitter for a WiMedia 3.1-4.8 GHz multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing ultra-wideband system is presented. With a separate transconductance stage, the quadrature up-conversion modulator achieves high linearity with low supply voltage. The co-design of different resonant frequencies of the modulator and the differential to single (D2S) converter ensures in-band gain flatness. By means of a series inductor peaking technique, the D2S converter obtains 9 dB more gain without extra power consumption. A divided-by-2 divider is used for carrier signal generation. The measurement results show an output power between -10.7 and -3.1 dBm with 7.6 dB control range, an OIP3 up to 12 dBm, a sideband rejection of 35 dBc and a carrier rejection of 30 dBc. The ESD protected chip is fabricated in the Jazz 0.18/zm RF CMOS process with an area of 1.74 mm~2 and only consumes 32 mA current (at 1.8 V) including the test associated parts.     

CMOS wireless phase-shifted transmitter

A fully integrated phase-shifted (PS) transmitter is presented in this paper. The PS transmitter employs switching power amplifiers, operates without mixers, and provides an intermodulation distortion-free output spectrum, making it a suitable choice for mobile communication systems. The RF blocks of the PS transmitter include a local oscillator, phase shifters, and switching class-F power amplifiers with wide-band matching networks. The PS transmitter is implemented in a standard single-polysilicon, six-metal 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS technology and occupies an area of 3 mm/sup 2/. It operates from a 1-V supply and provides better than 42 dBc adjacent channel power ratio with an output bandwidth of 50 MHz at 8 GHz. The PS transmitter RF front-end provides 22 dBm of average output power with a 38% average power added efficiency.     

A 40 GHz single-ended down-conversion mixer in 0.13 /spl mu/m SiGeC BiCMOS HBT

This work presents a single-ended active mixer realized with a 0.13 /spl mu/m BiCMOS SiGeC heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) technology. This mixer is designed to be integrated in a superheterodyne receiver for 40 GHz wireless communication systems. Local oscillator (LO) and RF signals are directly applied to the base of the HBT through two coupled lines. The mixer provides a down-conversion from 42 GHz to 2 GHz. The mixer exhibits a power conversion gain better than 2.4 dB and a measured double-sideband noise figure less than 8.3 dB for P/sub LO/=3 dBm (power of the local oscillator) under a global power consumption lower than 9.5 mW. This architecture exhibits good linearity performance with a measured IP/sub 1dB/ of about -7 dBm and an IIP3 of +4 dBm. The linear dynamic range for a 2 GHz system bandwidth is approximately 65 dB for P/sub LO/=+2 dBm and T/sub 0/=290 K. The third order spurious free dynamic range is calculated to be better than 52 dB.