mm-Wave Tranceivers and Building Blocks

Technology scaling and Moore’s law have paved the way for ever faster transistors, with device unity gain frequency (ft) exceeding 100GHz for today’s 90nm CMOS technology. The realization of functional circuits operating at or above the device ft is a challenging task, and the subject of much of this session, with demonstrations of circuits operating above the ft and close to the device fmax. The main advantages of Si-based technologies are the promise of high levels of integration and low manufacturing cost. In fact, in this session we see several highly integrated CMOS and SiGe front-end receivers and frequency synthesizers integrated into a single chip operating in the mm-wave frequency range.