A wideband on-chip millimeter-wave patch antenna in 0.18 μm CMOS with a low-resistivity （10 Ω.cm） silicon substrate is presented. The wideband is achieved by reducing the Q factor and exciting the high-order radiation modes with size optimization. The antenna uses an on-chip top layer metal as the patch and a probe station as the ground plane. The on-chip ground plane is connected to the probe station using the inner connection structure of the probe station for better performance. The simulated S11 is less than -10 dB over 46-95 GHz, which is well matched with the measured results over the available 40-67 GHz frequency range from our measurement equipment. A maximum gain of-5.55 dBi with 4% radiation efficiency at a 60 GHz point is also achieved based on Ansofi HFSS simulation. Compared with the current state-of-the-art devices, the presented antenna achieves a wider bandwidth and could be used in wideband millimeter-wave communication and image applications.
A 40-GHz phase-locked loop（PLL） frequency synthesizer for 60-GHz wireless communication applications is presented. The electrical characteristics of the passive components in the VCO and LO buffers are accurately extracted with an electromagnetic simulator HFSS. A differential tuning technique is utilized in the voltage controlled oscillator（VCO） to achieve higher common-mode noise rejection and better phase noise performance. The VCO and the divider chain are powered by a 1.0 V supply while the phase-frequency detector（PFD）and the charge pump（CP） are powered by a 2.5 V supply to improve the linearity. The measurement results show that the total frequency locking range of the frequency synthesizer is from 37 to 41 GHz, and the phase noise from a 40 GHz carrier is –97.2 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset. Implemented in 65 nm CMOS, the synthesizer consumes a DC power of 62 m W, including all the buffers.
A reconfigurable complex band-pass （CBP）/low-pass （LP） active-RC filter with a noise-shaping technique for wireless receivers is presented. Its bandwidth is reconfigurable among 500 kHz, 1 MHz and 4 MHz in LP mode and 1 MHz, 2 MHz and 8 MHz in CBP mode with 3 MHz center frequency. The Op-Amps used in the filter are realized in cell arrays in order to obtain scalable power consumption among the different operation modes. Furthermore, the filter can be configured into the 1st order, 2nd order or 3rd order mode, thus achieving a flexible filtering property. The noise-shaping technique is introduced to suppress the flicker noise contribution. The filter has been implemented in 180 nm CMOS and consumes less than 3 mA in the 3rd 8 MHz-bandwidth CBP mode. The spot noise at 100 Hz can be reduced by 14.4 dB at most with the introduced noise-shaping technique.
