Design and Modeling of Compact Reconfigurable and Scalable Passive Circuits for RF and mmWave Integrated Circuits in Silicon

The emergence of new generation wireless mobile communication technologies like 5G and beyond, has seen the spectrum management becoming increasingly complicated, as there is a requirement for the wireless devices to be able to handle numerous channels providing multiple services to the users either simultaneously or sequentially. In this context, it is important not to increase the overall size and cost of the circuit with an increase in the added utilities and extended usability features and functionalities provided by the wireless device. To this end, it is desirable to have integrated circuit components that are both tunable to various frequencies and are also compact in size. This would not only help to mitigate the issue of spectrum management but also help to solve the issue of spectrum scarcity. As part of this research work, our goal is to develop reconfigurable and compact designs, with compact models for on-chip passive components, for operation at both RF and mmWave frequencies. We demonstrate this, by focusing on solving the design issues for two specific circuits which are major circuits in wireless transceiver systems, by making them compact in size and reconfigurability capable. The two circuits we have focused on are: Band-select bandpass filters, and Time-delay units (also referred to as true-time delay cells). The two-band switchable bandpass filters are operable at 28-GHz and 38-GHz. The switching operation was performed using different types of switches provided by the semiconductor foundry we have used for getting our circuits manufactured. There was a good correlation obtained between our simulation and measurement results. We have also designed lowpass flat band delay lines and bandpass delay cells using compact inductor design techniques. The lowpass delay line design simulation and measurement results follow each other closely. The bandpass delay cell designs have been successfully theoretically formulated with flat band performance over the Ku-band of frequencies. Again, we are focusing on using compact inductor design methodology to have a smaller silicon footprint for all the circuits. Systematic design flow and design guidelines have been developed for all the designs, which can be directly used by designers for their specific design needs and specifications.

MAJOR ADVISOR: Dr. Andreas Weisshaar
COMMITTEE: Dr. Gabor Temes
COMMITTEE: Dr. Huaping Liu
COMMITTEE: Dr. Matthew Johnston
GCR: Dr. William H. Warnes