The 2020s belong to the ffth generation, 5G, that is a new radio (NR) standard, which is considered an outstanding evolution over the current communication systems and can be fexibly confgured for various application scenarios. Thus, our lives will be afected by 5G more dramatically than any other technology shift since it will lead us to a fully connected world. 5G using sub-6 GHz frequency band and millimeter wave (mm-Wave) spectrum together with other RF technologies like ultra-wideband (UWB) will provide multiple services.
As 5G NR transitioned from concept to reality, Wi-Fi has been the developing standard in parallel to keep it at par with the cellular standard providing better performance and higher throughput. Recently, the IEEE introduced a new task group, i.e., the Wi-Fi 6E or IEEE 802.11ax, to investigate and realize next-generation Wi-Fi technologies. Wi-Fi 6E refers to the set of Wi-Fi devices, provides gigabit throughputs with higher performance, faster data rates, and lower latency, and complements the deployment of 5G networks to provide connectivity indoors, where 5G NR is far less efective. Wi-Fi 6E was extended into the 6 GHz band, ofering considerable increases in available bandwidth. However, its relatively high power dissipation poses challenges for Wi-Fi being adopted for low power platforms, such as Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and wireless sensor nodes. Forecasts of numerous connected devices by 2030 and the realization of 5G and Wi-Fi 6E drive the need for circuit-level techniques to alleviate the increasing interference coming with this growing number of devices.
To this end, this work focuses on design techniques to provide highly interference resilient RF receiver front-end architectures in a power efcient manner and operating in a wide range of input RF frequencies. First, a literature review is presented. It focuses on the RF receiver frontends, their transistor-level circuit, and their specifcations. In the second part of this dissertation, we demonstrate three wideband RF receivers using a 4-, 8-, and 16-path switching confguration that allows for the selection of the third harmonic of the local oscillator (LO) frequency, and that efectively suppresses other harmonics to reduce the input frequency and power consumption of the multi-phase clock generator at higher RF frequency bands of operation.
When considering the design challenges related to the N-path switching flter, including the number of switches, power consumption of the LO phases generation circuitry, and noise performance, it is shown that an 8-path switching flter system is preferred to provide a suitable trade-of between the harmonic fold back efects, noise fgure, circuit area, and power consumption. Thus, the third part of this dissertation demonstrates a blocker-tolerant harmonic selection wideband RF receiver that can be reconfgured to select the frst and third harmonics of the switching frequency at the low and high frequency bands, respectively. We present a proof of concept integrated circuit in 130 nm CMOS technology process and present the measurement results.
Strong out-of-band (OOB) interference or undesired blockers can desensitize a receiver. To enhance resilience to the blockers, the RF front-end must avoid amplifcation at blocker frequencies at the input node of the receiver. To do this, two diferent wideband noise-cancelling wideband RF receiver architectures are then presented that have the capability of tolerating the LO harmonic blockers without sacrifcing noise performance and alleviating the SAW pre-flters requirement while consuming low clocking power consumption. Measurement results from the integrated circuit prototypes in 65 nm CMOS confrm our techniques’ benefts.
Since power dissipation is always important for wideband communication devices, more power can be saved by exploiting a self-demodulating direct conversion impulse radio UWB (IRUWB) architecture. To this end, this dissertation describes the study, design, fabrication, and characterization of a reconfgurable dual-band non-coherent wideband IR-UWB front-end. The proposed multi-band IR-UWB receiver can be digitally reconfgured in diferent operating frequency modes, and is able to support data modulated in binary frequency shift keying (FSK) in addition to on-of keying (OOK), and allows for the leveraging of ternary signaling by combining both OOK and FSK modulations. Ultimately, a detailed design methodology and measurement results of the fabricated receiver in TSMC 130 nm CMOS technology are presented.
The presented techniques will undoubtedly allow the development of new applications, and will thus contribute to the scientifc knowledge advancement on RF wideband receiver front-ends.
| Date | 12 Dec 2022 |
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| Original language | American English |
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| Awarding Institution | - École de technologie supérieure
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| Supervisor | Frédéric Nabki (Supervisor) |
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