UC Berkeley

For several decades, rapid improvements in the semiconductor industry, particularly the scaling of CMOS processes, have enabled high-speed wireless communications. However, the scaling of CMOS processes seems to be paying off less and less. Moreover, as the carrier frequency increases, the limited power of the CMOS chip can be quickly dissipated by passive elements or at the edges of the chip. The next generations of high-speed radios will require co-design and co-optimization of the chip and package to ensure that the highest data rates are achieved.This work addresses the design of a packaged wideband millimeter-wave radio. The fun- damental limitations of the CMOS process for millimeter-wave applications are examined. Noise measure theory is used to design low-noise amplifiers near the device activity limits. New techniques for minimizing the insertion loss of passive matching networks are proposed. The challenges of a package design are investigated, and an optimized transition structure is proposed. Finally, a 140GHz wideband receiver operating at half the transit frequency of the technology is implemented.