An on-chip antenna integrated with a transceiver in 0.18-µm CMOS technology

This paper presents an on-chip antenna integrated with a Kuband transceiver using a standard 0.18-μm CMOS process. An off-chip guard ring is used to improve the gain of the antenna. As the guard ring is implemented on the test carrier board, this gain improvement technology does not require additional process, and it is easy to implement. It is shown that, a gain improvement of 5.8 dBi can be obtained by using the guard ring with the radiation efficiency improved from 18% to 32%. Additionally, the influence of the CMOS process metal rules and the existence of the transceiver on the antenna performance are studied in this paper. The proposed antenna is fabricated with and without the transceiver, respectively. It is shown that the single-chip antenna (without transceiver) has a gain of 2.4 dBi at 17GHz, with a 3-dB bandwidth from 14.2GHz to 21.5GHz. Meanwhile, the transceiver (with integrated antenna) has a 3-dB bandwidth from 15.8GHz to 18.0GHz, with a peak gain of 13.5 dB in the transmitter link and a peak gain of 15.3 dB in the receiver link.

[1]  Gabriel M. Rebeiz.  Millimeter-wave and terahertz integrated circuit antennas , 1992, Proc. IEEE.

[2]  S. Chartier,et al.  Monolithic Integration of a Folded Dipole Antenna With a 24-GHz Receiver in SiGe HBT Technology , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.

[3]  Theodore S. Rappaport,et al.  On-chip integrated antenna structures in CMOS for 60 GHz WPAN systems , 2009, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[4]  M. Sun,et al.  On-chip antennas for 60-GHz radios in silicon technology , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices.

[5]  Zhiqiang Li,et al.  A Hybrid Integrated High-Gain Antenna With an On-Chip Radiator Backed by Off-Chip Ground for System-on-Chip Applications , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology.

[6]  Xiaojun Yuan,et al.  A 60-GHz OOK Receiver With an On-Chip Antenna in 90 nm CMOS , 2010, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[7]  Gabriel M. Rebeiz,et al.  A 76–84-GHz 16-Element Phased-Array Receiver With a Chip-Level Built-In Self-Test System , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.

[8]  A. Hajimiri,et al.  A 77-GHz Phased-Array Transceiver With On-Chip Antennas in Silicon: Receiver and Antennas , 2006, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[9]  S. Safavi-Naeini,et al.  High-Efficiency On-Chip Dielectric Resonator Antenna for mm-Wave Transceivers , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation.

[10]  Gabriel M. Rebeiz,et al.  A 76–84 GHz 16-element phased array receiver with a chip-level built-in-self-test system , 2012, 2012 IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium.

[11]  R. Plana,et al.  Micromachined Loop Antennas on Low Resistivity Silicon Substrates , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation.

[12]  Per-Simon Kildal,et al.  Artificially soft and hard surfaces in electromagnetics and their application to antenna design , 1988, 1993 23rd European Microwave Conference.

[13]  Cheng-Ying Hsu,et al.  A 60-GHz Millimeter-Wave CPW-Fed Yagi Antenna Fabricated by Using 0.18- $\mu\hbox{m}$ CMOS Technology , 2008, IEEE Electron Device Letters.