Novel on-chip passive circuits for RF, microwave, millimeter-wave and sub-THz applications

Abstract

In this paper, novel on-chip passive circuits for the RF, microwave, millimeter-wave, and sub-THz applications are introduced. First, an on-chip stacked stepped-impedance (SSI) inductor with an adjusted high quality-factor is analyzed and employed for RF VCO design with low phase-noise performance. Secondly, based on the proposed SSI inductor, a SSI transformer is implemented for the wideband matching network with high passive efficiency for a microwave power amplifier design with a wideband operation (i.e., 3.5-9.5 GHz). Thirdly, a novel on-chip 3D self-shielded capacitor is introduced for mm-wave application, i.e., 60 GHz DCO. Finally, a new slow-wave sub-THz resonant cell is introduced for the dual-resonance (i.e., 237 and 380 GHz) allocation for the dual-band sub-THz application. All the passive circuits mentioned above are fabricated using the silicon-based technology (i.e., CMOS and SiGe). Good agreements between the measurements and simulations are achieved, which verify the feasibility of the proposed circuits for the practical applications.