High Performance NPN BJTs in Standard CMOS Process for GSM Transceiver and DVB-H Tuner

Abstract

We report a high performance NPN bipolar junction transistor (BJT) processed in standard CMOS process that is applied to realize the direct conversion GSM receiver and DVB-H tuner. Through the variation of the base doping profile, performance of the NPN BJT has been tailored to meet the requirements of the RF circuits. Careful optimization is performed using both simulation and experiment. Optimized NPN BJT has maximum current gain of ~44, collector-emitter breakdown voltage of ~7V, collectorbase breakdown voltage of ~20V, Early voltage of~25V, cutoff frequency of ~8.0GHz, and maximum oscillation frequency of ~11.6GHz. Low frequency noise characteristics of the NPN BJTs are investigated and the best structure for low noise level is identified. The corner frequency of the 1/f noise is ~2kHz at a collector current of ~ 1.7mA, which is ~ 4 orders lower than that of NMOS. As the flicker noise level is much lower than the CMOS, NPN BJT is used to realize the zero intermediate frequency (ZIF) direct conversion receiver (DCR) for GSM transceiver and DVB-H tuner. The resulting GSM receiver chain has a gain of over 50dB and noise figure of 2.5~3.0dB. For DVB-H tuner operating in the range of 470~850MHz, NF of 4.5dB and IIP3 of -5dBm are achieved at a gain of 64dB Index Terms -NPN BJT, CMOS, RF, Direct Conversion, GSM, DVB-H.

An enhanced close-in phase noise LC-VCO using parasitic V-NPN transistors in a CMOS process

“…As verified in previous studies [2,6] , a parasitic V-NPN with an emitter area of 2 × 2 µm 2 is fabricated in 0.18 µm CMOS technology. Figure 1 describes the cross-section including the V-NPN, NMOS and PMOS transistors.…”

Low-frequency noise in downscaled silicon transistors: Trends, theory and practice

“…Open symbols are for the period from 2000 to 2004 ( [15],  [16,17], [18], [19]). Solid symbols are from in the period 2005-2020 ( [20], [21], [22], [23], ▼ [24,25,26,27]). Geometric averaging of the product A E ×K F is used to evaluate the trend in the dependence of K F on the emitter area A E gray line) and the variation limits ±2σ dB (thin grey lines).…”

“…The areal dependence with increasing normalized noise in npn BJTs with smaller emitter area A E is shown in Figure 2, using the SPICE parameter K F defined from The data for more than 150 devices are collected from [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27], and shown in Figure 2 with some points omitted for clarity. Since the numbers spread over several decades, we use geometric averaging technique [28] to extract the trend in the data from the product A E ×K F ; and the trend is A E ×K F ≈5.6×10 -9 µm 2 with logarithmic standard deviation of σ dB =3.4dB.…”

“…However, this normalized noise is rarely used to obtain the SPICE parameter K F except for cases when comparing noise in MOS and BJT at similar biasing current targeting specific circuit application, e.g. low power RF oscillators [22,23], BiCMOS circuits [83] and radiation resistance or sensitivity [102,103,104,165].…”

Design of a down-Conversion Mixer for Four Sub-Harmonic in W-Band

“…When LO is 10 10dBm and RF is -10dBm,each frequency components can be observed in Fig. 7.Since frequency component is mere 10dB lower than the IF component in the 23GHz,LPF need adopting further more [6] .…”