UC San Diego

In this dissertation, high-linearity sampling circuits are presented for wideband (multi-GS/s) electrical and optical sampling, millimeter-wave circuits are discussed for wideband communication, and injection-locking is presented for nonlinear sampling and spectrum analysis. A 2GS/s sampling receiver with 4.5 measured effective-number-of-bits is presented for spectrally efficient optical communication in a 45nm SOI CMOS process. Next, jitter limitations for broadband sampling circuits are discussed as sampling rates and input bandwidths are increased. An integrate-and-dump optical receiver is introduced for high dynamic range photonic analog-to-digital conversion at a sample rate of 2GS/s. Next, a novel rate-scalable photonic analog-to-digital converter is described that enables very-low-jitter, high linearity, and low-noise photonic sampling and subsequent analog-to-digital conversion of wideband signals up to 10GHz and beyond. A special emphasis is placed on achieving high system linearity. Integrate-and-sample receivers will be discussed within this context, as they bring both signal-to-noise ratio benefits due their approximation of a matched filter, and because they reduce the subsequent electronic analog-to-digital converter bandwidth, linearity, and jitter requirements. In addition, an alternative complementary photonic sampling architecture is presented for novel emph{pseudo-differential} photonic analog-to-digital conversion, and measurement results will be provided for the photonic sub-sampling front-end and the integrate-and-sample receiver with input frequencies up to 50GHz at a 2GS/s rate. The jitter benefits of optical sampling are demonstrated with a measurement of 36.4dB of SNR with a 49.8GHz input at a 2GS/s rate. Following this discussion of high-linearity receivers for photonic analog-to-digital conversion, electronic sampling circuits in SiGe BiCMOS and InP BiCMOS are described for sampling with high dynamic range. First, the design and measurement results for a track-and-hold 120nm SiGe BiCMOS are provided with 9-bit linearity at 2GS/s with an electrical input of 1Vpp. Next, very high-speed track-and-hold and time-interleaved sampling architectures are described in an InP BiCMOS technology for sampling at 40GS/s and beyond. In the second part of this dissertation, traveling-wave techniques for millimeter-wave wide-band communication circuits and nonlinear techniques for spectrum analysis are discussed. A Ka-band high-pass distributed amplifier is implemented in a 120nm SiGe BiCMOS process with a gain of 8.5 dB, sharp rejection below the low-frequency cutoff, a bandwidth of 21.5GHz, and a power consumption of 28mW from a 1.7V supply. Following, a constructive-wave deterministic quadrature oscillator and N-push modulator in 120nm SiGe BiCMOS is presented for operation at 92GHz in W-band. Operating at 32mW from a 2V supply, the oscillator contains an integrated quadrature modulator suitable for BPSK and QPSK modulation and a measured phase noise of -78.6dBc/Hz at an offset of 1MHz. Both of these millimeter-wave designs support wideband communication and could be used in receiver designs in conjunction with multi-GS/s analog-to-digital converters. Injection-locking as a means of spectral sampling is presented for chip-scale, low-power spectrum analysis suitable for cognitive radio and adaptive radio architectures. In comparison to state-of-the-art optical and electrical sampling techniques described in the first part of the dissertation, this all-analog injection-locked sampling technique has significant advantages in terms of power dissipation and integration on-chip. Two architectures will be presented for injection-locked spectrum analysis. First, an injection-locked oscillator array with measurement results from two injection-locked oscillators is implemented in 120nm SiGe BiCMOS with oscillation frequencies close to 5.5GHz. Second, an improved architecture is presented with balanced injection-locked phase-locked loops in which detection of the input signal's frequency and power is orthogonal