{"title":"Millimeter-Wave Integrated Silicon Devices: Active versus Passive — The Eternal Struggle Between Good and Evil : (Invited Paper)","authors":"Michele Spasaro, D. Zito","doi":"10.1109/SMICND.2019.8923669","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"With the extreme scaling, active devices in both CMOS and BiCMOS technologies have reached outstanding $f_{T}/f_{\\max}$, enabling an ever-increasing number of existing and emerging applications in the microwave and millimeter wave (mm-wave) frequency range. The increase in transistors $f_{T}/f_{\\max}$ has been so much significant that the performance of microwave and mm-wave ICs are limited mainly by losses in passive devices. In this paper, we address a discussion on qualitative and quantitative aspects that may help to further unveil the impact of such losses on the overall circuit performance and stimulate the adoption of effective loss-aware design methodologies. As example, we report the results related to the design of low power mm-wave low noise amplifiers (LNAs). Our results show how, in low power regime, the peformances of mm-wave LNAs are dominated by losses in passive components. We also show how loss-aware design methodologies can mitigate the performance degradation due to passives, resulting as an important tool to get the full potential out of the active devices available today.","PeriodicalId":151985,"journal":{"name":"2019 International Semiconductor Conference (CAS)","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"4","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"2019 International Semiconductor Conference (CAS)","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1109/SMICND.2019.8923669","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 4
Abstract
With the extreme scaling, active devices in both CMOS and BiCMOS technologies have reached outstanding $f_{T}/f_{\max}$, enabling an ever-increasing number of existing and emerging applications in the microwave and millimeter wave (mm-wave) frequency range. The increase in transistors $f_{T}/f_{\max}$ has been so much significant that the performance of microwave and mm-wave ICs are limited mainly by losses in passive devices. In this paper, we address a discussion on qualitative and quantitative aspects that may help to further unveil the impact of such losses on the overall circuit performance and stimulate the adoption of effective loss-aware design methodologies. As example, we report the results related to the design of low power mm-wave low noise amplifiers (LNAs). Our results show how, in low power regime, the peformances of mm-wave LNAs are dominated by losses in passive components. We also show how loss-aware design methodologies can mitigate the performance degradation due to passives, resulting as an important tool to get the full potential out of the active devices available today.