Event Date
Presented by: Dr. Behzad Razavi, professor of electrical engineering at University of California, Los Angeles
The 300-GHz band holds great potential for high-speed data communication. With the creation of the IEEE 802.15.3d standard in 2017 for radios operating in the unlicensed frequency band from 252 GHz to 322 GHz, there is now heightened interest in developing terahertz transceivers. Moreover, a number of researchers have demonstrated the viability of such radios in CMOS technology, portraying a promising future. These examples consume between 140 mW and 650 mW and employ off-chip local oscillators (LOs).
In this presentation, we contend that the feasibility of terahertz data-communication radios hinges upon their power consumption. We then present a fully-integrated receiver that employs a heterodyne architecture with 270-GHz and 30-GHz local oscillators to alleviate phase mismatch issues. The system incorporates three on-chip phase-locked loops to generate the LO phases for both downconversions. Realized in 28-nm CMOS technology, the prototype exhibits a noise figure of 16-20 dB, a gain of 17-21 dB, and a 1-dB compression point of -17.3 dBm. The phase noise of the 270-GHz PLL is -105 dBc/Hz at 10-MHz offset, amounting to an integrated jitter of 106 fs from 10 kHz to 10 MHz. The compact design occupies an active area of 0.06 mm2.
