Silicon technologies for applications up to millimetre-waves: Some design guidelines

This paper presents some guidelines for the design of silicon circuits, which are able to achieve state of the art performances in the microwave frequency range despite their integration with a standard technology. Firstly, we point out the benefits which may be expected from the large number of available metallic layers, and which make possible the implementation of highly integrated and low loss interconnects and passives. Next, we emphasize the advantages of microwave differential structures: without any increase of the circuit complexity, a very well balanced behaviour can be reached leading to a strong attenuation of common mode parasitic signals. Finally, the interest and the feasibility of mixed-mode circuits (analog with digital) are demonstrated through dedicated designs for microwave frequency synthesis. Christophe Viallon received the M.S. degree and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France in 1999 and 2003 respectively. From 2000 to 2004 he was with the Laboratory of Analysis and Architecture of Systems (LAAS), Toulouse, France, where he was conducting research on the optimization of differential circuit topologies for millimeter-wave applications using SiGe BiCMOS technologies. Since 2005, he is an associate professor at Paul Sabatier University, and his researches at the LAAS laboratory are mainly focused on nonlinear microwave integrated circuit design and above-IC passive elements development. éric Tournier was born in Saint-Jean d’Angely, France, in 1970. He received the Engineer degree and the Ph.D. degree both from the Institut National des Sciences Appliqu, Toulouse, France, in 1993 and 1998 respectively. Since September 1998, he has been an associate professor of electrical engineering at the university of Toulouse, and a researcher at the Laboratoire d’Analyse et d’Architecture des Systèmes (LAAS). He has worked on low frequency analog, digital and smart-power integrated circuits design, and is now involved in microwave circuits design methodologies on silicon technologies for telecommunication ICs. He currently works on digital design applied to high frequency synthesis (frequency dividers, phase/frequency detectors and direct digital synthesis (DDS)), and analog design using BAW devices. Thierry Parra was born in August 1964. He received the Ph.D. degree in electronics engineering and the accreditation to supervise research in 1991 and 1999, respectively, both from the Paul Sabatier University (UPS), Toulouse, France. He joined the LAAS-CNRS in 1991, and since 2002 he is Professor of electrical engineering. His research interests are currently on microwave components and new materials characterisation and modelling, and on optimisation and design of microwave integrated circuits, up to the millimeter wave frequency range.