ABSTRACT
Silicon (Si)–silicon-germanium (SiGe) bipolar complementary metal oxide semiconductor (BiCMOS) process technology is the workhorse for the implementation of wireless building blocks. Depending on the application, circuit function, and communication standard, a wide variety of requirements and specifications have to be fulfilled. This chapter reviews the basic distortion concepts relevant to radio frequency (RF) design. It discusses the linearity of a bipolar transistor for a simple but practical test circuit and identifies the dominant distortion phenomena for a particular bias condition. Based on the knowledge of the dominant nonlinearities, the chapter examines various design techniques for improved circuit linearity. It introduces the basics of these design methods and gives various design considerations and constraints by comparing the different circuit implementations for their performance based on a 70 GHz SiGe reference device. The chapter addresses power series models to explain some distortion phenomena under single and two-tone excitation.
