Conception et modélisation d'une tête RF à faible consommation pour un émetteur-récepteur à 60 GHz en CMOS 65 nm, Design of a low-power 60 GHz transceiver front-end and behavioral modeling and implementation of its key building blocks in 65 nm CMOS

Michael Krämer

Description

Sous la direction de Daniela Dragomirescu Reyna
Thèse soutenue le 03 décembre 2010: INSA de Toulouse
La réglementation mondiale, pour des appareils de courte portée, permet l’utilisation sans licence de plusieurs Gigahertz de bande autour de 60 GHz. La bande des 60 GHz répond aux besoins des applications telles que les réseaux de capteurs très haut débit autonome en énergie,ou les transmissions à plusieurs Gbit/s avec des contraintes de consommation d’énergie. Il y a encore peu de temps, les interfaces radios fonctionnant dans la bande millimétrique n’étaient réalisables qu’en utilisant des technologies III-V couteuses. Aujourd’hui, les avancées des technologies CMOS nanométriques permettent la conception et la production en masse des circuits intégrées radiofréquences (RFIC) à faible coût.Cette thèse s’inscrit dans des travaux de recherches dédiés à la réalisation d’un système dans un boîtier (SiP, System in Package) à 60 GHz contenant à la fois l’interface radio (bande de base et circuits RF) ainsi qu’un réseau d’antennes. La première partie de cette thèse est dédiée la conception de la tête RF de l’émetteur-récepteur à faible consommation pour l’interface radio. Les blocs clefs de cette tête RF (amplificateurs, mélangeurs et un oscillateur commandé en tension) sont conçus, réalisés et mesurés en utilisant la technologie CMOS 65 nm de ST Microelectronics. Des éléments actifs et passifs sont développés spécifiquement pour l’utilisation au sein de ces blocs. Une étape importante vers l’intégration de la tête RF complète de l’émetteur-récepteur est l’assemblage de ces blocs de base afin de réaliser une puce émetteur et une puce récepteur. A ce but, une tête RF pour le récepteur a été réalisée. Ce circuit présent une consommation et un encombrement plus réduit que l’état de l’art.La deuxième partie de cette thèse présente le développement des modèles comportementaux des blocs de base conçus. Ces modèles au niveau système sont nécessaires afin de simuler le comportement du SIP, qui devient trop complexe si des modèles détaillés du niveau circuitsont utilisés. Dans cette thèse, une nouvelle technique modélisant le comportement en régime transitoire et régime permanent ainsi que le bruit de phase des oscillateurs commandés en tension est proposée. Ce modèle est implémenté dans le langage de description de matérielVHDL-AMS. La technique proposée utilise des réseaux de neurones artificiels pour approximer la caractéristique non linéaire du circuit. La dynamique est décrite dans l’espace d’état. Grâce à ce modèle, il est possible de réduire d’une façon drastique le temps de calcul des simulations système tout en conservant une excellente précision
-Inductance
-Ultra-WideBand (UWB)
-Réseaux de capteurs sans fil
-Interface radio
-Rfic
-Mmic
-Radiocommunication
-Cmos
-Vhdl-ams
-Microélectronique
-Tête RF
-Récepteur
-Oscillateur
-Amplificateur
Worldwide regulations for short range communication devices allow the unlicensed use of several Gigahertz of bandwidth in the frequency band around 60GHz. This 60GHz band is ideally suited for applications like very high data rate, energy-autonomous wireless sensor networks or Gbit/s multimedia links with low power constraints. Not long ago, radio interfaces that operate in the millimeter-wave frequency range could only be realized using expensive compound semiconductor technologies. Today, the latest sub-micron CMOS technologies can be used to design 60GHz radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs)at very low cost in mass production. This thesis is part of an effort to realize a low power System in Package (SiP) including both the radio interface (with baseband and RF circuitry) and an antenna array to directly transmit and receive a 60GHz signal. The first part of this thesis deals with the design of the low power RF transceiver front-end for the radio interface. The key building blocks of this RF front-end (amplifiers, mixers and a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO)) are designed, realized and measured using the 65nm CMOS technology of ST Microelectronics. Full custom active and passive devices are developed for the use within these building blocks. An important step towards the full integration of the RF transceiver front-end is the assembly of these building blocks to form basic transmitter and receiver chips. Circuits with small chip size and low power consumption compared to the state of the art have been accomplished.The second part of this thesis concerns the development of behavioral models for the designed building blocks. These system level models are necessary to simulate the behavior of the entire SiP, which becomes too complex when using detailed circuit level models. In particular, a novel technique to model the transient, steady state and phase noise behavior of the VCO in the hardware description language VHDL-AMS is proposed and implemented. The model uses a state space description to describe the dynamic behavior of the VCO. Its nonlinearity is approximated by artificial neural networks. A drastic reduction of simulation time with respect to the circuit level model has been achieved, while at the same time maintaining a very high level of accuracy
-Ultra-WideBand (UWB)
-Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN)
-Radio interface
-Rfic
-Mmic
-Communication radio
-Microelectronics
Source: http://www.theses.fr/2010ISAT0027/document

Sujets

• Radiodiffusion
• Complementary metal oxide semi-conductor
• Micro-électronique
• Récepteur
• Oscillateur
• Amplificateur

Informations

• Publié par: Thesee
• Nombre de lectures: 100
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 12 Mo

Extrait

THÈSE


En vue de l'obtention du

DOCTORAT DE L ’UNIVERSITÉ DE TOULOUSE DOCTORAT DE L ’UNIVERSITÉ DE TOULOUSE

Délivré par L’Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Toulouse
Discipline ou spécialité : Micro-Ondes, Electromagnétisme et Optoélectronique


Présentée et soutenue par Michael M. Kraemer
Le 3.12.2010

Titre : Design of a low-power 60 GHz transceiver front-end and
behavioral modeling and implementation
of its key building blocks in 65 nm CMOS
JURY
Eric Kerherve, Professeur des Universités, IMS Bordeaux
Hermann Schumacher, Prof. Dr.-Ing., University of Ulm, Germany
Jean-Marie Dorkel, Professeur des Universités, INSA Toulouse
Sorin Voinigescu, Professor, University of Toronto, Canada
Didier Belot, AMS Senior Design Expert, STMicroelectronics, Crolles
Volker Ziegler, Microwave Expert, EADS Innovation Works, Munich, Germany
Stephane Rochette, R&D Microwave Engineer, Thales Alenia Space, Toulouse (invited)
Daniela Dragomirescu, Maître de Conferences, INSA Toulouse
Robert Plana, Professeur des Universités, Université de Toulouse


Ecole doctorale : Génie Electrique, Electronique, Télécommunications
Unité de recherche : LAAS-CNRS
Directeur(s) de Thèse : Daniela Dragomirescu, Robert Plana
Rapporteurs : Eric Kerherve, Hermann Schumacher
A B S T R A C T
Worldwide regulations for short range communication devices allow
the unlicensed use of several Gigahertz of bandwidth in the frequency
band around 60 GHz. This 60 GHz band is ideally suited for appli-
cations like very high data rate, energy-autonomous wireless sensor
networks or Gbit/s multimedia links with low power constraints. Not
long ago, radio interfaces that operate in the millimeter-wave frequency
range could only be realized using expensive compound semiconductor
technologies. Today, the latest sub-micron CMOS technologies can be
used to design 60 GHz radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs) at
very low cost in mass production.
This thesis is part of an effort to realize a low power System in Package
(SiP) including both the radio interface (with baseband and RF circuitry)
and an antenna array to directly transmit and receive a 60 GHz signal.
The first part of this thesis deals with the design of the low power RF
transceiver front-end for the radio interface. The key building blocks of
this RF front-end (amplifiers, mixers and a voltage controlled oscillator
(VCO)) are designed, realized and measured using the 65 nm CMOS
technology of ST Microelectronics. Full custom active and passive de-
vices are developed and characterized for the use within these building
blocks.
An important step towards the full integration of the RF transceiver
front-end is the assembly of these building blocks to form a basic re-
ceiver chip. Circuits with small chip size and low power consumption
compared to the state of the art have been accomplished.
The second part of this thesis concerns the development of behavioral
models for the designed building blocks. These system level models
are necessary to simulate the behavior of the entire SiP, which becomes
too complex when using detailed circuit level models.
In particular, a novel technique to model the transient, steady state and
phase noise behavior of the VCO in the hardware description language
VHDL-AMS is proposed and implemented. The model uses a state
space description to describe the dynamic behavior of the VCO. Its
nonlinearity is approximated by artificial neural networks. A drastic
reduction of simulation time with respect to the circuit level model has
been achieved, while at the same time maintaining a very high level of
accuracy.
iiiYou see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat.
You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles.
Do you understand this?
And radio operates exactly the same way:
you send signals here, they receive them there.
The only difference is that there is no cat.
— attributed to Albert Einstein
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
This is the place to express my thanks to many people without whom
my doctoral thesis would not have been the same.
First of all I want to express my thanks to Daniela Dragomirescu and
Robert Plana for their support and the excellent research environment
the MINC group provided.
Next, I want to thank all the examiners for taking their time to read
and evaluate my thesis.
I also want to thank Sorin Voinigescu and his Ph.D. students (especially
Katya Laskin) for the week I spend at the University of Toronto and the
technical discussions we had about mm-wave RFIC design.
Thanks go also to the members of the characterization group, especially
Alexandre Rumeau and Laurent Bary, for their help during various
measurement campaigns and the sysadmin team (especially Marie-
Dominique Cabanne and Frederick Ruault) for their high responsive-
ness and competent help. A special thank goes to Eric Tournier for his
help with the installation and use of the secure network. Thanks also
go to Olivier Lliopis for his support during the characterization of the
oscillator, and Teddy Borr and Christoph Viallon, all from MOST group,
for interesting discussions.
Thank you, Brigitte Ducrocq, for the very efficient help concerning
administrative tasks and the organization of conference trips.
My sincere thanks go also to all member of the MINC research group,
especially the ones I were in closer contact with, for having made my
almost four years at LAAS a pleasant experience. Thanks also for your
practical help and the many technical discussions. Namely I want to
mention the members of the Wireless Sensor Network team, which I
worked with on a daily basis: Aubin Lecointre, Vicent Puyal, Julien
Henaut, Thomas Beluch, Mariano Ercoli and Florian Perget.
At the same I am grateful for the time I spent at INSA Toulouse during
the monitorat and at the CIES - seminars and the atelier - projet. Thanks
to all I got to know there.
Thanks also go to the different external project partners and suppliers
I worked with, in particular CEA Leti, CMP, CNFM, Dolphin Integra-
tion, IMS Bordeaux, Mühlhaus consulting (support and distribution of
Sonnnet Software), NXP Netherlands, STMicroelectronics, and many
others. Furthermore, I want to acknowledge the principal sources of
financial support of this thesis, namely the research projects RadioSoC,
Qstream and Nanocomm.
And as I have surely forgotten someone important: Special thank to
those who find themselves not on this list but deserve to be on it.
... and most importantly: Kerstin, thanks for everything !
vC O N T E N T S
General Introduction 1
i 60 ghz transceiver design 3
1 Introduction to Communication in the 60 GHz Band 5
1.1 Applications for Low-power Very High Data Rate Wire-
less Communications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.2 The Unlicensed 60 GHz Frequency Band . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.2.1 Regulations of the 60 GHz band . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.2.2 Standardization for the 60 GHz Band . . . . . . . . 9
1.2.3 Characteristics of the 60 GHz band . . . . . . . . . 11
1.3 A Link Budget for the 60 GHz Band . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.4 The Radio Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2 60 GHz Transceiver Front-ends: State of the Art and Architec-
ture Considerations 21
2.1 Historical Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.2 Front-End Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.3 Transmitter Architectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2.3.1 Impulse Radio Transmitter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2.3.2 Direct Conversion T . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.3.3 Two-step Transmitter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.4 Receiver Architectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.4.1 Non-Coherent Receiver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.4.2 Super-regenerative Receiver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.4.3 Coherent Impulse Radio Receiver . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.4.4 Direct Conversion Receiver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
2.4.5 Heterodyne Receiver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.4.6 Image Rejection Receivers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.4.7 Six-Port Receiver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
2.4.8 Sub-harmonic Mixing in 60 GHz Transceivers . . . 43
2.5 The Adopted Transceiver Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.5.1 Direct Conversion Transmitter Front-end 44
2.5.2 Adopted Direct Conversion Receiver Front-end . . 46
2.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3 Millimeter-wave Circuit Design in 65 nm CMOS 49
3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
3.2 Technology Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
3.2.1 Metal Back-End . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.2.2 MOS Transistors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.2.3 Capacitors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3.2.4 Resistors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
3.3 Full-custom Variable Capacitors