A 65 nm Duplex Transconductance Path Up-Conversion Mixer for 24 GHz Automotive Short-Range Radar Sensor Applications

Self Cite

The proliferation of radar technology has given rise to a growing demand for advanced, high-performance transmitter front-ends operating in the 24 GHz frequency band. This paper presents a design analysis of a radio frequency (RF) transmitter (TX) front-end operated at a 24 GHz frequency and designed using 65 nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology for radar applications. The proposed TX front-end design includes the integration of an up-conversion mixer and power amplifier (PA). The up-conversion mixer is a Gilbert cell-based design that translates the 2.4 GHz intermediate frequency (IF) signal and 21.6 GHz local oscillator (LO) signal to the 24 GHz RF output signal. The mixer is designed with a novel technique that includes a duplex transconductance path (DTP) for enhancing the mixer’s linearity. The DTP of the mixer includes a primary transconductance path (PTP) and a secondary transconductance path (STP). The PTP incorporates a common source (CS) amplifier, while the STP incorporates an improved cross-quad transconductor (ICQT). The integrated PA in the TX front-end is a class AB tunable two-stage PA that can be tuned with the help of varactors as a synchronous mode to increase the PA bandwidth or stagger mode to obtain a high gain. The PA is tuned to 24 GHz as a synchronous mode PA for the TX front-end operation. The proposed TX front-end showed an excellent output power of 11.7 dBm and dissipated 7.5 mW from a 1.2 V supply. In addition, the TX front-end achieved a power-added efficiency (PAE) of 47% and 1 dB compression point (OP1dB) of 10.5 dBm. In this case, the output power is 10.5 dBm higher than the linear portion of the response. The methodologies presented herein have the potential to advance the state of the art in 24 GHz radar technology, fostering innovations in fields such as autonomous vehicles, industrial automation, and remote sensing.

“…If the IF voltage signal is considered to be V if+ = Acos

where g m1 and g m8 are the transconductances of the M 1 and M 8 transistors, respectively.…”

Section: Tx Front-end Integrated Circuitmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The mixer causes a low output impedance, which tends to obtain a low CG, conversion loss, and high power consumption. Thus, an effective research effort is needed to explore the novel design of the PA and mixer [ 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Front-End Development for Radar Applications: A Focus on 24 GHz Transmitter Design

Delwar,

Aras,

Siddique

et al. 2023

Self Cite

“…With such wide and popular adoptions in various wireless sensor and communication systems, CMOS implementation of 24 GHz RF transceiver-integrated circuits (IC) is highly required for realizing low-power small-form-factor single-chip radio systems. Various CMOS design results addressing the relevant design issues of the RF transmitter [ 3 ], RF receiver [ 4 ], and LO generation [ 5 ] have been reported in the literature. As part of such design efforts, this work presents a design of a 24 GHz CMOS RF receiver with a wide-range and precise I/Q mismatch calibration technique.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A 24 GHz CMOS Direct-Conversion RF Receiver with I/Q Mismatch Calibration for Radar Sensor Applications

Lee

Kim²,

Shin³

2022

A 24 GHz millimeter-wave direct-conversion radio-frequency (RF) receiver with wide-range and precise I/Q mismatch calibration is designed in 65 nm CMOS technology for radar sensor applications. The CMOS RF receiver is based on a quadrature direct-conversion architecture. Analytic relations are derived to clearly exhibit the individual contributions of the I/Q amplitude and phase mismatches to the image-rejection ratio (IRR) degradation, which provides a useful design guide for determining the range and resolution of the I/Q mismatch calibration circuit. The designed CMOS RF receiver comprises a low-noise amplifier, quadrature down-conversion mixer, baseband amplifier, and quadrature LO generator. Controlling the individual gate bias voltages of the switching FETs in the down-conversion mixer having a resistive load is found to induce significant changes at the amplitude and phase of the output signal. In the calibration process, the mixer gate bias tuning is first performed for the amplitude mismatch calibration, and the remaining phase mismatch is then calibrated out by the varactor capacitance tuning at the LO buffer’s LC load. Implemented in 65 nm CMOS process, the RF receiver achieves 31.5 dB power gain, −35.2 dBm input-referred 1 dB compression power, and 4.8–7.1 dB noise figure across 22.5–26.1 GHz band, while dissipating 106.2 mA from a 1.2 V supply. The effectiveness of the proposed I/Q mismatch calibration is successfully verified by observing that the amplitude and phase mismatches are improved from 1.0–1.5 dB to 0.02–0.19 dB, and from 10.8–23.8 to 1.1–3.2 degrees, respectively.

“…Microstrip resonators are traditionally used to build on their basis high-frequency frequency-selective devices with high-quality electrical characteristics, which are distinguished by manufacturability and low cost in mass production [1]. In addition, they are used in microstrip devices for measuring the electrical characteristics of various materials and substances, that is, they can be used as microwave sensor designs [2][3][4].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Nevertheless, the problem of searching for a resonator design with a given center frequency, as well as with a given bandwidth, considered in this paper, is relevant for most types of devices Due to their small circuit sizes (up to several millimeters in each dimension), such resonators can be used in hybrid integration with small wireless networking and radar devices [41,42]. Ultra-wideband (multi-mode) microwave filters are an essential part of the radar sensor systems [4,43,44] and antenna sensors [2] which are of high interest due to the development of unmanned vehicles and robotics. Such systems include both microstrip resonators with the simplest geometric configuration [45][46][47] and more complex designs [48,49].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Automatic Design of Multimode Resonator Topology with Evolutionary Algorithms

Stanovov

Khodenkov²,

Popov³

et al. 2022

Microwave electromagnetic devices have been used for many applications in tropospheric communication, navigation, radar systems, and measurement. The development of the signal preprocessing units including frequency-selective devices (bandpass filters) determines the reliability and usability of such systems. In wireless sensor network nodes, filters with microstrip resonators are widely used to improve the out-of-band suppression and frequency selectivity. Filters based on multimode microstrip resonators have an order that determines their frequency-selective properties, which is a multiple of the number of resonators. That enables us to reduce the size of systems without deteriorating their selective properties. Various microstrip multimode resonator topologies can be used for both filters and microwave sensors, however, the quality criteria for them may differ. The development of every resonator topology is time consuming. We propose a technique for the automatic generation of the resonator topology with required frequency characteristics based on the use of evolutionary algorithms. The topology is encoded into a set of real valued parameters, which are varied to achieve the desired features. The differential evolution algorithm and the genetic algorithm with simulated binary crossover and polynomial mutation are applied to solve the formulated problem using the dynamic penalties method. The experimental results show that our technique enables us to find microstrip resonator topologies with desired amplitude-frequency characteristics automatically, and manufactured devices demonstrate characteristics very close to the results of the algorithm. The proposed algorithmic approach may be used for automatically exploring the new perspective topologies of resonators used in microwave filters, radar antennas or sensors, in accordance with the defined criteria and constraints.