LO Chain (×12) Integrated 190-GHz Low-Power SiGe Receiver With 49-dB Conversion Gain and 171-mW DC Power Consumption

Abstract

A 190-GHz mixer-based down-conversion receiver realized in a 130-nm SiGe BiCMOS technology featuring high-speed heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs) with (f _T , f _max ) = (300, 500) GHz is presented. The core part of the receiver consists of a low-noise amplifier (LNA), an active tunable fundamental mixer, an intermediate frequency (IF) buffer amplifier (BA), and an active inverse balun. A wideband, high conversion gain (CG) local oscillator (LO) chain is integrated to make the receiver suitable for applications requiring tunable LO, which contains a multiplier with a multiplication factor of 12 (×12) and a driver amplifier. To exploit the best possible performance with ultralow dc power consumption (P _dc ), the mixer and LNA transistors operate at forward-biased base-collector junction voltage (V _BC ). With a fixed IF frequency at 1 GHz, this receiver exhibits a peak CG of 49 dB with a 14-dB tuning range and a minimum single-sideband noise figure (NF) of 16.5 dB, consuming only 29-mW static dc power for the core part and 171 mW overall, including the LO chain. Within the CG tuning range, this receiver achieves a 6-dB RF bandwidth (BW) from 25 to 32 GHz. Compared with previously reported receivers at similar frequencies, the highest CG and the lowest P _dc with highly competitive performance in terms of BW, CG tuning range, 1-dB output compression point, and NF have been achieved.