High-speed, high-performance wireless and wireline applications using silicon-germanium BiCMOS technologies

Abstract

The objective of the research in this dissertation is to demonstrate the viability of using silicon-germanium (SiGe) bipolar/complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (BiCMOS) technologies in novel high-speed, high-performance wireless and wireline applications. These applications include self-healing integrated systems, W-Band phased array radar systems, and multi-gigabit wireline transceiver systems. The contributions from this research are summarized below: 1. Design of a wideband 8-18 GHz signal source with the best reported tuning range and die area combination for self-healing applications [95]. 2. Design of a robust, multi-band 8-10/ 16-20 GHz signal source with amplitude-locking for self-healing applications. A figure-of-merit (FoM) is proposed that combines tuning range and die area, and this work achieves the best FoM compared with state-of-the art [51]. 3. First ever reported on-die healing of image-rejection ratio of an 8-18 GHz mixer integrated with the multi-band test signal source [52], [96]. 4. Design of a 94 GHz differential Colpitts oscillator with 14% tuning range that spans 86-99 GHz for phased-array radar systems. 5. Identification of technology platform related bottlenecks in multi-gigabit wireline systems. A novel study of linearity of switching transistors in a current-mode logic (CML) gate. 6. A novel FoM that can be used to predict large-signal CML delay using small-signal Y-parameter techniques [97].