ABSTRACT
Radio-frequency (RF) circuit design using silicon technologies has progressed over the past decade from small-scale building blocks to complete systems-on-a-chip enabling applications such as 3G wireless telephony. The performance improvements offered by silicon-germanium heterostructure bipolar transistors (SiGe HBTs) in bipolar complementary metal oxide semiconductor (BiCMOS) technologies are enabling even further advances in wireless transceiver performance and integration. This chapter reviews the aspects of RF circuit design relevant to the design of wireless building blocks. It examines Low-noise amplifier (LNA), mixer, and voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) circuits. Radio-frequency integrated circuits (RFICs) are constructed using both active and passive devices fabricated directly on a semiconducting substrate. Chip-level integration is possible within the monolithic context, where low complexity circuit blocks may be combined into a more complex functional block. Cascode preamplifier designs are popular because they offer wide bandwidth and excellent reverse isolation, which simplifies impedance matching and minimizes local oscillator (LO) leakage from the mixer back to the antenna via the LNA.
