A Bluetooth radio in 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS

This paper describes the results of an implementation of a Bluetooth radio in a 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS process. A low-IF image-reject conversion architecture is used for the receiver. The transmitter uses direct IQ-upconversion. The VCO runs at 4.8-5.0 GHz, thus facilitating the generation of 0/spl deg/ and 90/spl deg/ signals for both the receiver and transmitter. By using an inductor-less LNA and the extensive use of mismatch simulations, the smallest silicon area for a Bluetooth radio implementation so far can be reached: 5.5 mm/sup 2/. The transceiver consumes 30 mA in receive mode and 35 mA in transmit mode from a 2.5 to 3.0-V power supply. As the radio operates on the same die as baseband and SW, the crosstalk-on-silicon is an important issue. This crosstalk problem was taken into consideration from the start of the project. Sensitivity was measured at -82 dBm.     

A 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS bioluminescence detection lab-on-chip

The paper describes a bioluminescence detection lab-on-chip consisting of a fiber-optic faceplate with immobilized luminescent reporters/probes that is directly coupled to an optical detection and processing CMOS system-on-chip (SoC) fabricated in a 0.18-/spl mu/m process. The lab-on-chip is customized for such applications as determining gene expression using reporter gene assays, determining intracellular ATP, and sequencing DNA. The CMOS detection SoC integrates an 8 /spl times/ 16 pixel array having the same pitch as the assay site array, a 128-channel 13-bit ADC, and column-level DSP, and is fabricated in a 0.18-/spl mu/m image sensor process. The chip is capable of detecting emission rates below 10/sup -6/ lux over 30 s of integration time at room temperature. In addition to directly coupling and matching the assay site array to the photodetector array, this low light detection is achieved by a number of techniques, including the use of very low dark current photodetectors, low-noise differential circuits, high-resolution analog-to-digital conversion, background subtraction, correlated multiple sampling, and multiple digitizations and averaging to reduce read noise. Electrical and optical characterization results as well as preliminary biological testing results are reported.     

A low-voltage folded-switching mixer in 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS

Scaling of CMOS technologies has a great impact on analog design. The most severe consequence is the reduction of the voltage supply. In this paper, a low voltage, low power, AC-coupled folded-switching mixer with current-reuse is presented. The main advantages of the introduced mixer topology are: high voltage gain, moderate noise figure, moderate linearity, and operation at low supply voltages. Insight into the mixer operation is given by analyzing voltage gain, noise figure (NF), linearity (IIP3), and DC stability. The mixer is designed and implemented in 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS technology with metal-insulator-metal (MIM) capacitors as an option. The active chip area is 160 /spl mu/m/spl times/200 /spl mu/m. At 2.4 GHz a single side band (SSB) noise figure of 13.9 dB, a voltage gain of 11.9 dB and an IIP3 of -3 dBm are measured at a supply voltage of 1 V and with a power consumption of only 3.2 mW. At a supply voltage of 1.8 V, an SSB noise figure of 12.9 dB, a voltage gain of 16 dB and an IIP3 of 1 dBm are measured at a power consumption of 8.1 mW.     

A matrix amplifier in 0.18-/spl mu/m SOI CMOS

A fully integrated matrix amplifier with two rows and four columns (2-by-4) fabricated in a three-layer metal 0.18-/spl mu/m silicon-on-insulator (SOI) CMOS process is presented. It exhibits an average pass-band gain of 15 dB and a unity-gain bandwidth of 12.5 GHz. The input and output ports are matched to 50 /spl Omega/ using m-derived half sections; the measured S/sub 11/ and S/sub 22/ values exceed -7 and -12 dB, respectively. Integrated in 2.0/spl times/2.9mm/sup 2/, it dissipates 233.4 mW total from 2.4- and 1.8-V power supplies.     

A 70-MHz 8-bit/spl times/8-bit parallel pipelined multiplier in 2.5-/spl mu/m CMOS

A design is presented for an 8-bit/spl times/8-bit parallel pipelined multiplier for high speed digital signal-processing applications. The multiplier is pipelined at the bit level. The first version of this multiplier has been fabricated in 2.5-/spl mu/m CMOS technology. It has been tested at multiplication rates up to 70 MHz with a power dissipation of less than 250 mW. Clock skew, a major problem encountered in high-speed pipelined architectures, is overcome by the use of a balanced clock distribution network all on metal, and by proper use of clock buffers. These issues and the timing simulation of the pipeline design are discussed in detail. Possible extensions and improvements for achieving higher performance levels are discussed. The conversion of the two-phase clocking scheme to an inherently single-phase clock approach is one possible improvement. A design using this approach has been simulated at 75 MHz and is currently being fabricated.     

A low-power oscillator mixer in 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS technology

A downconversion double-balanced oscillator mixer using 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS technology is proposed in this paper. This oscillator mixer consists of an individual mixer stacked on a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO). The stacked structure allows entire mixer current to be reused by the VCO cross-coupled pair to reduce the total current consumption of the individual VCO and mixer. Using individual supply voltages and eliminating the tail current source, the stacked topology requires 1.0-V low supply voltage. The oscillator mixer achieves a voltage conversion gain of 10.9 dB at 4.2-GHz RF frequency. The oscillator mixer exhibits a tuning range of 11.5% and a single-sideband noise figure of 14.5 dB. The dc power consumption is 0.2 mW for the mixer and 2.94 mW for the VCO. This oscillator mixer requires a lower supply voltage and achieves a higher operating frequency among recently reported Si-based self-oscillating mixers and mixer oscillators. The mixer in this oscillator mixer also achieves a low power consumption compared with recently reported low-power mixers.     

A unified turbo/Viterbi channel decoder for 3GPP mobile wireless in 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS

A channel decoder chip compliant with the 3GPP mobile wireless standard is described. It supports both data and voice calls simultaneously in a unified turbo/Viterbi decoder architecture. For voice services, the decoder can process over 128 voice channels encoded with rate 1/2 or 1/3, constraint length 9 convolutional codes. For data services, the turbo decoder is capable of processing any mix of rate 1/3, constraint length 4 turbo encoded data streams with an aggregate data rate of up to 2.5 Mb/s with 10 iterations per block (or 4.1 Mb/s with six iterations). The turbo decoder uses the logMAP algorithm with a programmable logsum correction table. It features an interleaver address processor that computes the 3GPP interleaver addresses for all block sizes enabling it to quickly switch context to support different data services for several users. The decoder also contains the 3GPP first channel de-interleaving function and a post-decoder bit error rate estimation unit. The chip is fabricated in a 0.18-/spl mu/m six-layer metal CMOS technology, has an active area of 9 mm/sup 2/, and has a peak clock frequency of 110.8 MHz at 1.8 V (nominal). The power consumption is 306 mW when turbo decoding a 2-Mb/s data stream with ten iterations per block and eight voice calls simultaneously.     

A 5.9-GHz voltage-controlled ring oscillator in 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS

This paper presents the design of three- and nine-stage voltage-controlled ring oscillators that were fabricated in TSMC 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS technology with oscillation frequencies up to 5.9 GHz. The circuits use a multiple-pass loop architecture and delay stages with cross-coupled FETs to aid in the switching speed and to improve the noise parameters. Measurements show that the oscillators have linear frequency-voltage characteristics over a wide tuning range, with the three- and nine-stage rings resulting in frequency ranges of 5.16-5.93 GHz and 1.1-1.86 GHz, respectively. The measured phase noise of the nine-stage ring oscillator was -105.5 dBc/Hz at a 1-MHz offset from a 1.81-GHz center frequency, whereas the value for the three-stage ring oscillator was simulated to be -99.5 dBc/Hz at a 1-MHz offset from a 5.79-GHz center frequency.     

A 40-GHz frequency divider in 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS technology

An analysis of regenerative dividers predicts the required phase shift or selectivity for proper operation. A divider topology is introduced that employs resonance techniques by means of on-chip spiral inductors to tune out the device capacitances. Configured as two cascaded /spl divide/2 stages, the circuit achieves a frequency range of 2.3 GHz at 40 GHz while consuming 31 mW from a 2.5-V supply.     

Robust sound localization in 0.18 /spl mu/m CMOS

This paper presents a hardware implementation of a sound localization algorithm that localizes a single sound source by using the information gathered by two separated microphones. This is achieved through estimating the time delay of arrival (TDOA) of sound at the two microphones. We have used a TDOA algorithm known as the "phase transform" to minimize the effects of reverberations and noise from the environment. Simplifications to the chosen TDOA algorithm were made in order to replace complex operations, such as the cosine function, with less expensive ones, such as iterative additions. The custom digital signal processor implementing this algorithm was designed in a 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS process and tested successfully. The test chip is capable of localizing the direction of a sound source within 2.2/spl deg/ of accuracy, utilizing approximately 30 mW of power and 6.25 mm/sup 2/ of silicon area.     

A 32-GHz non-uniform distributed amplifier in 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS

This letter presents a fully integrated distributed amplifier in a standard 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS technology. By employing a nonuniform architecture for the synthetic transmission lines, the proposed distributed amplifier exhibits enhanced performance in terms of gain and bandwidth. Drawing a dc current of 45mA from a 2.2-V supply voltage, the fabricated circuit exhibits 9.5-dB pass-band gain with a bandwidth of 32GHz while maintaining good input and output return losses over the entire frequency band. With a compact layout technique, the chip size of the distributed amplifier including the testing pads is 940/spl times/860/spl mu/m/sup 2/.     

A 2.4-GHz 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS self-biased cascode power amplifier

A two-stage self-biased cascode power amplifier in 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS process for Class-1 Bluetooth application is presented. The power amplifier provides 23-dBm output power with a power-added efficiency (PAE) of 42% at 2.4 GHz. It has a small signal gain of 38 dB and a large signal gain of 31 dB at saturation. This is the highest gain reported for a two-stage design in CMOS at the 0.8-2.4-GHz frequency range. A novel self-biasing and bootstrapping technique is presented that relaxes the restriction due to hot carrier degradation in power amplifiers and alleviates the need to use thick-oxide transistors that have poor RF performance compared with the standard transistors available in the same process. The power amplifier shows no performance degradation after ten days of continuous operation under maximum output power at 2.4-V supply. It is demonstrated that a sliding bias technique can be used to both significantly improve the PAE at mid-power range and linearize the power amplifier. By using the sliding bias technique, the PAE at 16 dBm is increased from 6% to 19%, and the gain variation over the entire power range is reduced from 7 to 0.6 dB.     

A fully integrated SOC for 802.11b in 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS

A fully integrated system-on-a-chip (SOC) intended for use in 802.11b applications is built in 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS. All of the radio building blocks including the power amplifier (PA), the phase-locked loop (PLL) filter, and the antenna switch, as well as the complete baseband physical layer and the medium access control (MAC) sections, have been integrated into a single chip. The radio tuned to 2.4 GHz dissipates 165 mW in the receive mode and 360 mW in the transmit mode from a 1.8-V supply. The receiver achieves a typical noise figure of 6 dB and -88-dBm sensitivity at 11 Mb/s rate. The transmitter delivers a nominal output power of 13 dBm at the antenna. The transmitter 1-dB compression point is 18 dBm and has over 20 dB of gain range.     

A high-speed 850-nm optical receiver front-end in 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS

A high-speed optical interface circuit for 850-nm optical communication is presented. Photodetector, transimpedance amplifier (TIA), and post-amplifier are integrated in a standard 0.18-/spl mu/m 1.8-V CMOS technology. To eliminate the slow substrate carriers, a differential n-well diode topology is used. Device simulations clarify the speed advantage of the proposed diode topology compared to other topologies, but also demonstrate the speed-responsivity tradeoff. Due to the lower responsivity, a very sensitive transimpedance amplifier is needed. At 500 Mb/s, an input power of -8 dBm is sufficient to have a bit error rate of 3/spl middot/10/sup -10/. Next, the design of a broadband post-amplifier is discussed. The small-signal frequency dependent gain of the traditional and modified Cherry-Hooper stage is analyzed. To achieve broadband operation in the output buffer, so-called "f/sub T/ doublers" are used. For a differential 10 mV/sub pp/ 2/sup 31/-1 pseudo random bit sequence, a bit error rate of 5/spl middot/10/sup -12/ at 3.5 Gb/s has been measured. At lower bit-rates, the bit error rate is even lower: a 1-Gb/s 10-mV/sub pp/ input signal results in a bit error rate of 7/spl middot/10/sup -14/. The TIA consumes 17mW, while the post-amplifier circuit consumes 34 mW.     

A 2.4-GHz RF sampling receiver front-end in 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS

This paper presents an integrable RF sampling receiver front-end architecture, based on a switched-capacitor (SC) RF sampling downconversion (RFSD) filter, for WLAN applications in a 2.4-GHz band. The RFSD filter test chip is fabricated in a 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS technology and the measurement results show a successful realization of RF sampling, quadrature downconversion, tunable anti-alias filtering, downconversion to baseband, and decimation of the sampling rate. By changing the input sampling rate, the RFSD filter can be tuned to different RF channels. A maximum input sampling rate of 1072 MS/s has been achieved. A single-phase clock is used for the quadrature downconversion and the bandpass operation is realized by a 23-tap FIR filter. The RFSD filter has an IIP/sub 3/ of +5.5 dBm, a gain of -1 dB, and more than 17 dB rejection of alias bands. The measured image rejection is 59 dB and the sampling clock jitter is 0.64 ps. The test chip consumes 47 mW in the analog part and 40 mW in the digital part. It occupies an area of 1 mm/sup 2/.     

RF noise in 0.18-/spl mu/m and 0.13-/spl mu/m MOSFETs

Studied the gate finger number and gate length dependence on minimum noise figure (NF/sub min/) in deep submicrometer MOSFETs. A lowest NF/sub min/ of 0.93 dB is measured in 0.18-/spl mu/m MOSFET at 5.8 GHz as increasing finger number to 50 fingers, but increases abnormally when above 50. The scaling gate length to 0.13 /spl mu/m shows larger NFmin than the 0.18-/spl mu/m case at the same finger number. From the analysis of a well-calibrated device model, the abnormal finger number dependence is due to the combined effect of reducing gate resistance and increasing substrate loss as increasing finger number. The scaling to 0.13-/spl mu/m MOSFET gives higher NF/sub min/ due to the higher gate resistance and a modified T-gate structure proposed to optimize the NF/sub min/ for further scaling down of the MOSFET.     

W-band multiple-ring resonator by standard 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS technology

A high-Q multiple-ring resonator fabricated by standard 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS process is presented. This design achieves a high quality factor at W-band without the need of any post-processing steps. Simulation results indicate that the four open-loop rings enhance the quality factor by 120% compared with the resonator with a single ring. The measured quality factors are 38 and 83 at /spl sim/75GHz under the loaded and unloaded conditions, respectively.     

OC-192 transmitter and receiver in standard 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS

This paper presents the first fully integrated SONET OC-192 transmitter and receiver fabricated in a standard 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS process. The transmitter consists of an input data register, 16-b-wide first-in-first-out (FIFO) circuit, clock multiplier unit (CMU), and 16:1 multiplexer to give a 10-Gb/s serial output. The receiver integrates an input amplifier for 10-Gb/s data, clock and data recovery circuit (CDR), 1:16 demultiplexer, and drivers for low-voltage differential signal (LVDS) outputs. An on-chip LC-type voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) is employed by both the transmitter and receiver. The chipset operates at multiple data rates (9.95-10.71 Gb/s) with functionality compatible with the multisource agreement (MSA) for 10-Gb transponders. Both chips demonstrate SONET-compliant jitter characteristics. The transmitter 10.66-GHz output clock jitter is 0.065 UI/sub pp/ (unit interval, peak-to-peak) over a 50-kHz-80-MHz bandwidth. The receiver jitter tolerance is more than 0.4 UI/sub pp/ at high frequencies (4-80 MHz). A high level of integration and low-power consumption is achieved by using a standard CMOS process. The transmitter and receiver dissipate a total power of 1.32 W at 1.8 V and are packaged in a plastic ball grid array with a footprint of 11/spl times/11 mm/sup 2/.     

A fully integrated 5.8 GHz U-NII band 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS VCO

A fully integrated 5.8 GHz CMOS L-C tank voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) using a 0.18-/spl mu/m 1P6M standard CMOS process for 5 GHz U-NII band WLAN application is presented. The VCO core circuit uses only PMOS to pursue a better phase noise performance since it has less 1/f noise than NMOS. The measurement is performed by using a FR-4 PCB test fixture. The output frequency of the VCO is from 5860 to 6026 MHz with a 166 MHz tuning range and the phase noise is -96.9 dBc/Hz at 300 kHz (or -110 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz) with V ctrl = 0 V. The power consumption of the VCO excluding buffer amplifiers is 8.1 mW at V/sub DD/ = 1.8 V and the output power is -4 dBm.     

K-band low-noise amplifiers using 0.18 /spl mu/m CMOS technology

Two K-Band low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) are designed and implemented in a standard 0.18 /spl mu/m CMOS technology. The 24 GHz LNA has demonstrated a 12.86 dB gain and a 5.6 dB noise figure (NF) at 23.5 GHz. The 26 GHz LNA achieves an 8.9 dB gain at the peak gain frequency of 25.7 GHz and a 6.93 dB NF at 25 GHz. The input referred third-order intercept point (IIP3) is >+2 dBm for both LNAs with a current consumption of 30 mA from a 1.8 V power supply. To our knowledge, the LNAs show the highest operation frequencies ever reported for LNAs in a standard CMOS process.