RF Microelectronics

Dr. Mohamed Abdel- Hamid

Electronics & Communications Engineering Department

Course Description
Basic Concepts in RF Design. RF Passive Components. Transmission lines, and scattering parameters. Active RF Components. RF Power amplifiers.

LNA amplifiers and Mixers.

Oscillators.

References
R. Ludwig, RF Circuit Design Theory and Applications,

Prentice Hall, 2000, USA.

B. Razavi, RF Microelectronics, Prentice Hall, 2000, USA.

T. H. Lee, The Design of CMOS Radio Frequency

Integrated Circuits, Cambridge University Press, 1998, UK. Lecture notes

Chapter 1

Basic Concepts in RF Design

Applications
In addition to familiar wireless products such as pagers and celluar phones, RF technology has created many other markets. 1. WLANs, Wireless Local Area Network, using the frequency bands 900MHz and 2.4 GHz. 2. GPS ,Global Positioning System, is used to determine ones location. Operating in the 1.5 GHz frequency range. 3. RF IDs, RF Identification system, RF IDs can be attached to objects or persons. Operating in the frequency bands 900MHz and 2.4 GHz. 4. Home Satellite Network, Operating in the 10 GHz range.

Generic Digital RF Transceiver

Transmitter

Receiver

Circuit diagram of 2 GHZ Power amplifier for a cellular phone

The input is fed through Input Matching Network The separation of the RF signal from the DC is achieved through RF Blocking Network that feature the so called Radio Frequency Coils RFCs

Electromagnetic Waves
To understand the upper frequency limit, beyond which conventional circuit theory can no longer be applied to analyze an electric system, we shall recall the representation of an electromagnetic wave. In free space, EM waves propagates in the Z-direction and can be written in the form:

Where the propagation constant is given by:

Transverse Electromagnetic Mode (TEM)

TEM wave characteristics

Intrinsic Impedance
(I)

Where is the material permeability and is the is the material permittivity.

The phase velocity of TEM wave is given by:

Problem:

(II)

(I)

(II)

(III)
(III)

IEEE Frequency spectrum

Basic concepts in RF Circuits

I- Nonlinearity and Time Variance

Effects of Nonlinearity
Many RF circuits can approximated with a linear model to obtain their response. Nonlinearities often lead to interesting and important phenomena. We will consider the following system,

1. Harmonics
If,

(*)

2. Gain Compression

(*)

3. Desensitization and Blocking

4. Intermodulation

II- Noise
1. Thermal Noise

2. Shot Noise

3. Flicker Noise

4. Input-Referred Noise

Example: Calculate
and

Solution : Assume only one dominant source of thermal noise

5. Noise Figure

Example1:

Example2: