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

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