RF and mm-wave IC Design
Design key components of RF and mm-wave Front-End Modules, i.e. Switches, Low-Noise Amplifiers (LNA) and Power Amplifiers (PA).
Switch Modules
DC-5 GHz SPDT on HR and TR SOI substrates
In the work [Kazemi18], we implemented an RF SPDT switch on two types of RF-SOI substrates: a High-Resistivity (HR) wafer and a Trap-Rich (TR) wafer. The 180 nm partially-depleted SOI node from TowerJazz was used.
Linearity measurements showed that the substrate choice impacts the harmonic distortion of the switch module by more than 15 dB. For these reasons, TR substrates sold by Soitec are named “eSI™”, which stands for enhanced Signal Integrity.
DC-40 GHz SPDT in 22nm FD-SOI with Back-Gate
In the work [Rack20], we implemented three mm-wave SPDT switches in the 22 nm FD-SOI technology from GlobalFoundries (22FDX®) based on the three flavors of mm-wave FETs.
We showed that:
- FD-SOI is suitable for Ka band switch modules.
- Back-Gate biasing improves Switch FoMs appreciably.
- Sacrificing the back-gate functionnality to reduce substrate shunt parasitics is worthwhile when designing switchers above approximately 40 GHz.
Low-Noise Amplifiers
Two-Stage Cascoded 39 GHz LNA in 22nm FD-SOI
In the work [Nyssens20?], we implemented
