THIS REPORT HAS BEEN WITHDRAWN

Meng Wei

EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley

Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2023-283

December 15, 2023

http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/Withdrawn/EECS-2023-283.pdf

Achieving 100 + Gb/s data throughput is a key objective and an active area of research for future 6G communication, therefore, sub-THz(100-300GHz) is of great interest due to its potential to meet this data rate requirement. However, designing an energy efficient silicon-based sub-THz wireless system is challenging due to the high free space path loss and low active device gain at these frequencies. This dissertation addresses these problems by proposing architecture-level and circuit-level techniques. This dissertation consists of wireless transmitter design techniques at both 140GHz and 200GHz. We first introduce two iterations of a packaged 4 element phased-array 140GHz transmitter. A slotline-based power combiner is utilized for high output power generation. In addition, the TX system efficiency is enhanced by employing negative resistance compensation (NRC) in the up-conversion mixer, intensively utilizing low insertion loss(IL) slot line based interstage matching networks and current re-use Gm-cells in baseband(BB) amplifiers. Fabricated in 28nm CMOS technology, the 4 element phased-array 140GHz transmitter not only achieves 100 + Gb/s data rate with competitive energy efficiency, but it also achieves high EIRP with high system efficiency. Next, we propose a multi-way power combined 200GHz PA which employs different gain boosting techniques and low loss broadband multi-way power splitters/combiners. Last, we present a novel power efficient 200GHz digital transmitter(DTX) architecture: an oscillator array assisted digital IQ sharing transmitter. The proposed DTX architecture not only leverages digital scaling for power/performance but also utilizes amplifiers in saturation region with enhanced power efficiency. A 200GHz low phase-noise sub-sampling phase-locked loop (SS-PLL) is also included to stabilize the frequency of the harmonic oscillator array.

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