A SiGe BiCMOS Transmitter/Receiver Chipset With On-Chip SIW Antennas for Terahertz Applications

Author

Hu, Sanming ; Xiong, Yong-Zhong ; Zhang, Bo ; Wang, Lei ; Lim, Teck-Guan ; Je, Minkyu ; Madihian, Mohammad

Author_Institution

Inst. of Microelectron., A*STAR (Agency for Sci., Technol. & Res.), Singapore, Singapore

Volume

47

Issue

11

fYear

2012

Firstpage

2654

Lastpage

2664

Abstract

This paper presents a terahertz (THz) transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) chipset operating around 400 GHz in 0.13- μm SiGe BiCMOS technology. The Tx chip consists of a voltage-controlled oscillator, a buffer, a modulator, a power amplifier, a frequency tripler, and a substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) antenna. This antenna has an additional high-pass filtering characteristic to suppress the unwanted fundamental (f₀) and second harmonic (2f₀) signals by 50 and 30 dB, respectively. The Rx chip includes a proposed reconfigurable SIW antenna and a novel two-mode subharmonic mixer with ~ 5-dB reduction of conversion loss. The Rx chip consumes 50 nA from a 1.2-V supply. The measurement results of the Tx and Rx chips and a back-to-back test of the Tx/Rx chipset show the feasibility and pave the way of implementing a fully integrated THz system in silicon technology for mass production.

Keywords

BiCMOS integrated circuits; Ge-Si alloys; harmonics suppression; radio receivers; radio transmitters; semiconductor materials; signal denoising; submillimetre wave antennas; submillimetre wave integrated circuits; substrate integrated waveguides; terahertz wave devices; BiCMOS transmitter-receiver chipset; SiGe; buffer; conversion loss reduction; current 50 nA; frequency tripler; fully integrated THz system; high-pass filtering characteristic; mass production; modulator; on-chip SIW antennas; power amplifier; second harmonic signal suppression; silicon technology; size 0.13 mum; substrate integrated waveguide antenna; terahertz receiver; terahertz transmitter; two-mode subharmonic mixer; unwanted fundamental harmonic suppression; voltage 1.2 V; voltage-controlled oscillator; BiCMOS integrated circuits; Modulation; Receivers; Slot antennas; System-on-a-chip; Transmitters; On-chip antenna; receiver; reconfigurable; substrate integrated waveguide (SIW); terahertz (THz); transmitter;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Solid-State Circuits, IEEE Journal of

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9200

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/JSSC.2012.2211658

Filename

6301781