Silicon-on-silicon integration of a GSM transceiver with VCO resonator

Abstract

Accurate and spurious-free design of an integrated VCO resonator in a GSM transceiver is demonstrated. The high-Q inductor (Q=60 at 1 GHz) in the resonator is on a high-resistivity silicon substrate and the GSM chip is flip-chip mounted on the same substrate. The VCO meets all GSM requirements: phase noise is-142 dBc/Hz at 10 MHz from the 1018 MHz center frequency. A single bipolar chip contains the RF transmit, receive, and synthesizer subsections for the GSM standard. The addition of an external low-noise amplifier, power amplifier, and filters complete the GSM radio section. A number of inductors and capacitors are integrated onto the chip. Many of the passive components needed to operate the transceiver, however, are poor candidates for on-chip integration either because their values are too large or because they have stringent quality factor (Q) requirements.