ABSTRACT
The millimeter-wave range usually starts at 30 GHz and ends at 300 GHz entering the sub-millimeter-wave range. The low thermal expansion coefficient of silicon may be an advantage for a practical application of silicon-based millimeter-wave integrated circuits. Negative resistance circuits are widely used to realize low-phase noise oscillators. An active device is used to compensate for the attenuation in a resonator and to generate oscillations. Coplanar monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) with silicon germanium (SiGe) heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) may be realized on high-resistivity silicon (HRS) substrates. There are two important reasons to deal with multipliers: First, it is easier to generate oscillations with transistors at microwave frequencies and then to multiply the signal. Second, in most system applications frequency dividers are needed for stabilization purposes, which are rarely available at millimeter waves. A first HBT-based amplifier MMIC is demonstrated at Ka-band frequencies on high-resistivity substrate.
