Session: TH2C | Passive Semiconductor Microwave Components |
Chair: | Peter Russer, Munich University of Technology |
Co-Chair: | Magdalena Salazar - Palma, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid |
Abstract: | For monolithic integrated microwave and millimeterwave circuits passive distributed planar and three-dimensional lumped and distributed circuit structures are of great importance. This session deals with spiral inductors, transmission line resonators, filter, tuners and directional couplers. Emphasis is put on silicon CMOS technology. |
| | TH2C-01 | A CMOS 3-dB Directional Coupler Using Edge-Coupled Meandered Synthetic Transmission Lines |
1438 | M. Chiang, H. Wu, C. C. Tzuang, Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, Taipei, Taiwan |
| The design of CMOS 3-dB directional coupler by incorporating the edge-coupled meandered synthetic quasi-TEM transmission lines (TLs) is presented. The proposed synthetic TL, so-called the complementary-conducting strip coupled-line (CCS CL) consists of the unit cell, which has more design parameters than that of the conventional thin-film coupled-line (TF CL). The extensive theoretical analyses shows the proposed meandered CCS CL can break the process limitations on straight TC CL, achieving the k-value with 10.8% improvement. The prototype of the 3-dB directional coupler is designed based on the proposed CCS CL and fabricated in an area of 120.0 μm × 240.0 μm (without contact pads) based on the standard 0.18-μm 1P6M CMOS technology. The experiments show the prototype can cover a bandwidth from 14.2 GHz to 36.9 GHz with a coupling of 4.4 dB. The literature survey shows that the presented design achieves the tight coupling with the highest efficiency on the circuit miniaturization. |
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TH2C-02 | A 60 GHz High-Q Tapered Transmission Line Resonator in 90nm CMOS |
1547 | C. Marcu, A. M. Niknejad, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, United States |
| This paper presents an integrated high quality factor tapered transmission line resonator for 60 GHz applications, in a 90nm digital CMOS process. The resonator takes advantage of the standing wave properties of shorted quarter wavelength transmission lines to enhance the resonant quality factor by trading off between resistive and conductive losses. The tapered resonator achieves over 70% quality factor improvement over an optimal uniform resonator and can provide even higher gains on lower loss substrates. |
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TH2C-03 | A Reconfigurable MEMS-less CMOS Tuner for Software Defined Radio |
1581 | L. Rabieirad, S. Mohammadi, Purdue University, West Lafayette, United States |
| Design, simulation and measurement of a reconfigurable CMOS RF tuner that can be utilized in the RF front-end of a software defined radio are presented. 0.13µm high Q CMOS varactors controlled by a 22bit shift register are placed periodically on a low loss Coplanar Waveguide (CPW) transmission line to form a 4-11GHz reconfigurable tuner. The monolithic tuner does not use any MEMS devices to achieve the reconfigurability. |
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TH2C-04 | Three-Stage Bandpass Filters Implemented in Silicon IPD Technology Using Magnetic Coupling between Resonators |
1181 | R. C. Frye1, K. Liu2, Y. Lin3, 1RF Design Consulting, LLC, Piscatway, United States, 2STATS ChipPAC Inc., Tempe, United States, 3STATS ChipPAC Ltd., Singapore, Singapore |
| Thin-film technologies most commonly use capacitors or inductors to couple resonator stages for the implementation of band-pass filters. The use of mutual inductance (referred to as magnetically coupled, to distinguish it from conventional inductive coupling) has some inherent advantages, especially for ESD robustness and DC isolation. Furthermore, this method is naturally suited for the implementation of balanced filters. This paper describes the design and characterization of some example bandpass filters for wireless LAN applications in silicon IPD technology using capacitively-loaded ring resonators coupled by mutual inductance. |
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TH2C-05 | Dummy Fill Insertion Considering the Effect on High-Frequency Characteristics of Spiral Inductors |
1770 | A. Tsuchiya1, H. Onodera1, 1Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, 2Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan |
| This paper discusses the effect of dummy fills on spiral inductors. In fabrication processes that use copper wire, metal dummy fills are required to prevent thickness fluctuation in CMP stage. Dummy fills have been thought to affect the wire capacitance, however in high frequency, dummy fills also affect the wire resistance and the wire inductance due to the eddy current in dummy fills. This work evaluates the effect of the dummy fills by 3D field solver and proposes a method to suppress the effect of dummy fills. Experimental results show that the proposed method can decrease the effect of dummy fills on quality factor by 55%. |
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