Sharif Digital Repository

In this project a wide-band inductorless Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) has been designed using 0.18 micrometer CMOS technology. The specification of this amplifier has been explored in frequency band of 330MHz to 10GHz. Wide-band input and output impedance matching, low Noise-Figure (NF), reasonable voltage gain and low power consumption are the main challenges of Low Noise Amplifier design. Without using an inductor a better overall performance of LNA in a wide frequency band as well as a lower chip area has been achieved. In this design a novel noise cancellation technique in common-gate topology has been used for lowering the Noise Figure of the LNA. Group Delay of the designed LNA, which is... 

In this project, issues related to designing and fabricating active phase shifter blocks on the silicon substrate have been examined. Phase shifter circuits are designed in a way that have the most bandwidth and the less sensitivity to process characteristics changes and environmental conditions. The purpose of this research, is designing an active 6 bits phase shifter. The active phase shifter synthesizes the required phase using a phase interpolation process by adding quadrature phased input signals. It uses a new quadrature all-pass filter for quadrature signaling with a wide bandwidth. Also substitute structure has been suggested to this filter which is the main block in determining... 

Integration of radio transceivers results in developing low power low cost wireless systems and allows delivery of multimedia contents to battery-powered mobile terminals. Portable reception of digital video for hand-held devices is one of the applications, for which, some telecommunications standards have been developed in the recent years. This research deals with the integrated implementation of the radio frequency parts of the digital video receiver, especially the frequency synthesizer. The key aspects of the digital video reception system are the required signal to noise ratio, which is relatively high, wide band input signals and strong interferers in the receiving band.
In... 

This thesis deals with the front-End of an Integrated RFID Reader operated in 860MHz to 960MHz, which integrates a RF transceiver including PA, LNA and Mixer. In the receiver part, a power amplifier was fabricated and measured and in the transmitter part, LNA and Mixer were designed. There is a growing interest in utilizing CMOS technologies for RF power amplifiers (PAs). Although several advances have been made recently to enable full integration of PAs in CMOS, it is still among the most difficult challenges in achieving a truly single-chip radio system in CMOS. This is exacerbated by supply voltage reduction due to CMOS technology scaling and on-chip passive losses due to the conductive... 

Fully integrated frequency synthesizer is one of the important system-on-chips building blocks. Among this circuit’s remarkable applications, Bioelectronics field is very common. In these applications, advanced microelectronic circuits are used in order to diagnosis and treatment of diseases. The aim of this thesis is design and implementation a wideband frequency synthesizer in a 0.18um CMOS technology. The main usage of this circuit is in a fully integrated implantable biomedical sensory chip. This circuit generates two necessary local signals in sensory chip to stimulus cells and process the information.
Frequency synthesizer is based on phased locked loop (PLL) circuit and produce... 

In most radio receivers like superheterodyne receivers, a weak desired incoming signal is accompanied with many interferer signals that are much more powerful than the desired signal itself. These interferers, also called blockers, can cause a great disturbance in the functionality of the receiver. Due to gain compression and an increase in the noise figure (NF) of the receiver, the blockers should be filtered before the arrival at the output of the LNA. Because of the low quality factors of the available on chip inductors and in order to eliminate the out of band interferer signals and image frequency (in superheterodyne receivers), usually an external surface acoustic wave (SAW) filter is... 

In this dissertation a special category of RF filters known as multi-path filters are introduced, chracterized and implemented. The center frequency of the multi-path filters can be tuned by changing the frequency of the clocks applied to the filter, which makes them attractive for use in multi-standard receivers. In this thesis, different types of multi-path filters are studied and by proposing different circuits, their various applications are covered. First, the concept of multi-path filters and their chracteristics are studied. Then a novel technique to analyze these filters based on Fourier analysis is proposed and then, based on this analysis, a new circuit architecture with reduced... 

In the communication systems, there are two types of blockers: in-band and out-of-band. High frequency pre-filters and band-pass filters can be used to suppress the out-of band blockers. However, using these methods does not affect the in-band interferers. Spatial filtering by means of phased array antennas and using frequency filtering can suppress both types of interferers. In a typical phased array receiver, all of the received signals pass through active blocks (such as LNAs, active phase shifters, driver amplifiers, etc.) that amplify the interferers before canceling them. Therefore, because of the high strength of the interferers, the dynamic range of the front-end blocks preceding... 

With the increasing number of elderly people as a proportion of the total population in the world and the aging of the world's population, the need for medical care has increased. On the one hand, most of the elderly population have chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, etc., which do not require hospitalization in healthcare centers, but they need to monitor their health status. Given the progress of technology, the measurement of vital body signals has been made possible with non-invasive methods. In this thesis, an attempt has been made to provide a wearable and portable solution for the measurement, monitoring, and collection of vital signals based on the Internet of Things... 

In this thesis, An All Digital Frequency Synthesizer for use in RF applications is designed in 180nm CMOS. Different blocks such as Phase detector, Loop filter and Loop counter is designed. Finally, an All Digital Frequency Synthesizer is modeled using this circuits and an Digitally controlled oscillator model and is designed for GSM. In this thesis a new method is proposed to noise shape the quantization noise of the time to digital converter. The Time to Digital Converter has 7mW power consumption for 0ns to 1ns input range. Using this noise shaping method, quantization noise is reduced about 20dB. Also, limit cycle related spurs is reduced significantly using first order and second order... 

Nowadays, general electronic devices such as computers, notebooks, cellular phones and etc. are supporting Bluetooth, RFID and Zigbee standards. By integrating all of RF sections of mentioned standards, total power consumption, occupied area and total cost and price will be decreased. RF devices communications with maximum bandwidth and data rate with minimum power consumption are the main purposes in designing RF and digital building blocks. Bluetooth and Zigbee standards are applied for networking the desired RF devices. RFID standard is providing automatic identifications, item tracking and tracing, item management and inventory. RFID standard makes the communication between Tags and... 

This project introduces a topology enabling a Low-Noise Amplifier (LNA) not only to attenuate the unwanted signals at the input stage but also to satisfy the input matching requirement in an ultra wide frequency band. Moreover, a single ended to differential signal conversion method is proposed. This method employs a noise reduction idea, so it has a lower noise figure compared to the other introduced methods with the same purpose. The introduced methods have been utilized in designing two 0.18μm reconfigurable CMOS LNAs. One of the designed LNAs covers 2.3-3.6 GHz band width and the other one covers the UHF (470-860MHz) band. Stringent sensitivity requirement, presence of strong in-band... 

The Internet of Things is one of those concepts that, while it has gained significant importance in recent years in scientific and industrial communities, still faces various challenges, such as power consumption and scalability. In networks powered by batteries, it is necessary to optimize power consumption to extend the network's lifespan to the maximum possible extent. Additionally, considering the large number of connected devices in the Internet of Things network, it is essential to optimize the number of devices connected per gateway, ultimately reducing the need for fewer gateways in a network. In this research, we utilized simulation-based methods to extract output parameters of a... 

A new class of design has been introduced in the RF circuits and Frequency Synthesizers, which is based on the digital circuits. Implementation of the digital synthesizers suppresses the need to use loop filter and thus reduces the loop lock time. In this thesis different topologies of digitally controlled oscillators using inductor and capacitor tank and all digital architectures used in high frequency all digital synthesizers in 0.18um CMOS technology has been inspected and simulated. Novel techniques introduced to improve the ring oscillator-based design’s specifications which doesn’t need inductor. Using the introduced techniques, the phase noise has been lessened acceptably with respect... 

Phase shifters are commonly used in the implementation of phased-array antenna systems.The function of these systems is highly dependent on the performance of phase shifters. In addition, phase shifter circuits are used in some applications such as antenna test and regulation, power amplifier linearization, and QAM modulator implementation, to name but a handful. In this project, design of phase shifter blocks, as well as limitations of fabrication on silicon substrate, is studied and these blocks are designed for maximum bandwidth and minimum sensitivity based on fabrication characteristics and environmental conditions. Design of a 6-bit phase shifter based on vector-sum method is the... 

Impedance spectroscopy is known as one of the important integrated sensing methods in micro scale Biosensors and electrochemical sensors. Recently, Impedance spectroscopy has been noticed in many micro scale applications. These micro scale applications is being developed specially in bioelectronics and biomedical. The goal of this thesis is designing an on-chip impedance spectroscope system for high frequency with 10 bits resolution via fully electrical blood glucose concentration measurement. This system extracts the blood glucose concentration data through measuring the permittivity coefficient of blood at 1 GHz frequency. In this thesis, new method for high frequency high resolution... 

This thesis activities, consists of three main parts. The first part is, manufacturing and optimization of the electrical part of blood glucose measurement devices, based on electrochemical sensors. In this part, design of blood glucose measurement systems based on two and three electrode electrochemical sensors are proceeded and the accuracy of the electrical block, is increased up to 1mg/dl according to sensor current range. The second part, is related to the design of different probes for blood electrical characteristics (impedance magnitude) measurements, at low frequencies. Measurements with these probes show, first the blood impedance magnitude range at low frequencies and moreover,... 

Diabetes is one of the most catastrophic diseases in the world. There will be an end to patients’ problems if scientists can invent the artificial pancreas, but there is no implantable sensing core available. All of the sensors used for measuring blood glucose level were based on an electrochemical sensor which will generate a glucose level dependent electric current. The chemical structure of that sensor will deny its usability for in vivo applications. By exploring several biological and electrical literatures we introduced a fully electrical method for sensing the blood glucose level by impedance measurement. In this thesis we introduced a new method for sensing the blood glucose... 

In this thesis a novel passive method for integrated blood pressure monitoring in implantable applications has been proposed. The main constraints of such implantable systems are power consumption, area and simplicity of the implanted part and detected pressure is transmitted wirelessly to the external system and recorded. In this thesis an oscillator in 0.18um CMOS process has been proposed to detect the resonance frequency of the implanted tank circuit in the external unit of an implantable blood pressure monitoring system. Other designed circuits include a buffer, frequency detector, voltage to current converter and an 8 bit analog to digital converter. The system is capable of measuring... 

A lot of efforts to make CMOS integrated wireless systems have been made in the past few years. One of the most challengeable parts of wireless systems is power amplifier designing with high output power (Watt Level). Power amplifier linearization and efficiency are the most important parameters. Today, high linear and efficiency power amplifier designing is one of the most important designer challenge of integrated circuits in wireless networks. Generally, there is one inverse relation between linearization and power efficiency. So, circuit and system solutions have been suggested that high efficiency nonlinear switching power amplifier with linearization techniques and linear power...