A Highly-Linear Low-Power Down-Conversion Receiver for Digital Transmitter’s Error Detection

Wireless data traffic is projected to steadily increase in the near future, necessitating the demand for transceivers with higher linearity and efficiency. Digital power amplifiers have the potential to achieve these higher efficiency demands while digital pre-distortion can be used to improve their linearity. Digital pre-distortion requires a...

Design of Current-Mode RF/mm-wave Front-Ends

This thesis investigates the performance limits and design challenges of two current-mode front-end concepts that target WiFi and mm-wave 5G applications, respectively. The first concept is a power amplifier (PA), which operates at 2.4GHz and is driven by a direct-digital RF modulator (DDRM). A design for the PA, which also includes a parallel...

An FM Chirp Waveform Generator and Detector for Radar: Modulator and Mixer Subsystems

This thesis presents two submodules which are part of 'an FM Chirp Waveform Generator and Detector for Radar', namely the mixer and the modulator. The goal of this project is to design and simulate these submodules from an educational perspective. The modulator is implemented as a single-ended common-base Colpitts oscillator with modulation...

Design of Frequency locked loop and Receiver front-end for Burst-Chirp UWB Radar Transceiver for Vital Signs and Occupancy Sensing by monitoring the respiration and heartbeat rate

While there are many technologies and electronic systems used to detect the human vital signs by monitoring the heart beat rate & respiration rate, all these systems rely on physical contact with the human body. Furthermore, each measuring system can only be used for a single person thus increasing the cost and complexity of integrated...

Multi-band/Multi-Mode RF Front-end Receiver for Basestation Applications

In the last couple of years, mobile telephony has truly become global, with more than 4 billion users worldwide nowadays (compared to less than 1bn ten years ago). This has represented a boost not just for the mobile phones industry, but also for that of wireless infrastructure. Larger-scale production and increased competition have transformed...

60GHz front-end receiver chain in 90nm CMOS technology

Operation at millimeter-wave frequency, where up to 7GHz of unlicensed bandwidth is available in the 60GHz band, provides an opportunity to meet the higher data rate demands of wireless users. Advancements in silicon technology permit one to consider exploiting the 60GHz band for commercial applications (e.g., short range, wireless HDTV...