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NEW BROADBAND WIRELESS COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES DEVELOPED FOR COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS
The novel low-noise amplifier for ultrabroadband communications designed in CMOS technology won the ‘Best Student Paper Award’ at the 2006 IEEE RFIC Symposium in San Francisco. The awarded paper, titled “A 1.2V Reactive-Feedback 3.1-10.6GHz Ultrawideband Low-Noise Amplifier in 0.13μm CMOS”, is co-authored by PhD student Michael Reiha, M.Sc. and Prof. dr. John Long of the Electronics Research Laboratory/DIMES, in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science at TU Delft. This year’s symposium exhibited over 125 papers from top research centres, 70 of which were eligible for the award. Broadband wireless communication technologies currently being developed for commercial applications, such as multi-band and multi-standard radio, software-defined and adaptive radio, and ultrawideband radio, promise data transfer speeds up to 1Gb/s. The UWB amplifier developed by the Delft researchers is a key link that allows laptop computers, digital cameras, and other electronic appliances to exchange data at such high speeds. In addition to speed, UWB offers the promise of using less battery power than conventional wireless technologies such as Bluetooth or 802.11. It is also a strong contender in wireless sensing, which is an enabling technology in numerous health, transport and security applications. One difficulty in the design of wideband amplifiers for UWB systems is operating from a single battery with low current consumption, while amplifying signals from 3.1-10.6GHz with minimal degradation in quality. The amplifier developed by Reiha and Long in Delft, and manufactured by IBM Microelectronics, pioneers the use of on-chip transformers in a commercial CMOS technology, the same technology used to build personal computers and most other portable electronic equipment. The integrated transformer allows the amplifier to operate at just 1.2V, consuming only 9mW of power and occupying less than 1mm2 of area while still meeting the tough design specifications set for UWB communication. Integration of the circuit in CMOS technology is yet another step towards the eventual integration of wireless and computing technology onto the same IC, a dream of microelectronic researchers since the mid-1980s.
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