(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-12-06)
Gong, Yunyi
The objective of this research is to study and leverage the unique properties and advantages of silicon-germanium (SiGe) heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) integrated circuit technologies to better design radio frequency (RF) and millimeter wave (mm-wave) circuit components. With recent developments, the high yield and modest cost silicon-based semiconductor technologies have proven to be attractive and cost-effective alternatives to high-performance III-V technology platforms. Between SiGe bipolar complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (BiCMOS) technology and advanced RF complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology, the fundamental device-level differences between SiGe HBTs and field-effect transistors (FETs) grant SiGe HBTs clear advantages as well as unique design concerns. The work presented in this dissertation identifies several advantages and challenges on design using SiGe HBTs and provides design examples that exploit and address these unique benefits and problems with circuit component designs using SiGe HBTs.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2018-03-08)
Gong, Yunyi
The objective of the proposed research is to investigate the design of switch-less bi-directional amplifier (BDA) for loss compensation in passive transmit/receive (T/R) modules, using Silicon-Germanium (SiGe) BiCMOS technology. We have demonstrated an X-band 6-bit high-pass (HP)/low-pass (LP) switched-type phase shifter with embedded inter-stage switch-less SiGe BDA cores. The incorporation of single-ended cascode BDA cores in the phase shifter effectively compensated the insertion loss of passive components, while preserving the bi-directionality of the building block. To further explore the potential of SiGe BDAs in passive T/R loss compensation, we investigate differential topology for switch-less SiGe BDA design.