Silicon Based Millimeter Wave ASICs: From Circuits to System Applications

The increasing demand for bandwidth in applications such as high speed communication transceivers and rotational gas spectroscopy, has driven recent research efforts in the millimeter wave and terahertz circuits and systems. This revived interest goes hand-in-hand with advances in modern CMOS and SiGe technologies that are capable of providing transistors with cutoff frequencies fmax above 200 GHz and expected to approach 1 THz within few years. Such technologies are key enablers for low cost, high yield, multi-functional and highly integrated digitally enhanced systems. However, as the cutoff frequency of transistors increase, their output power, particularly when covering a wide bandwidth becomes very limited. In addition, switching such transistors as they operate close to their f_max is a challenging task that requires rethinking the traditional communications and sensing/spectroscopy architectures with emphasis on extracting the output power of transistors while transmitting data rates exceeding tens and hundreds of Gbps and / or scanning a wide bandwidth. In this paper, we review recent progress on silicon-based fundamental building blocks for high power, wide band signal sources and high speed transceiver architectures at frequencies greater than or equal 100 GHz.