Silicon-based Millimeter-wave RFIC Design for W-Band Wafer-scale Phased Arrays

Sponsor: DARPA through University of California, San Diego and Teledyne Scientific Corp.

Grouop: Kwang-Jin Koh

Phased-array has been widely used for defense radar systems over the last decades and based on mainly III-V technologies. Recently there have been substantial research efforts to realize millimeter-wave (30-300 GHz) radar systems in silicon technologies, CMOS and SiGe HBT processes, in search for a low-cost and highly integrated solution. After successful demonstrations and technology transfers of SiGe phased arrays at 6-50 GHz to main stream defense industry, we are conducting research on 94 GHz phased-array radar systems in SiGe HBT process. One of challenging parts in millimeter-wave designs is power amplifier design with high efficiency (>20% of PAE). A signal source having high spectral purity is another major concern in millimeter-wave ranges. Main research goals in this project are to develop an optimum radar architecture favorable to silicon processes which suffer from limited device performances at > 94 GHz; to develop high-efficient power amplifier basing on class-F topology at 94 GHz; to develop efficient carrier modulation and demodulation technique to back off limited VCO performance at millimeter-wave frequencies; and to investigate a noise modulation technique to improve SNR in silicon-based radar systems over > 100 GHz.     

Course: RFIC Track