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In this article, a wideband quasi-circulator (QC) with the low noise figure (NF) and high 1-dB compression point (P1dB) is proposed. The slotline-based 180° hybrid is introduced to achieve the wideband high transmitter-receiver (TX-RX) isolation. Meanwhile, the bidirectional in-phase stage and the nonreciprocal out-of-phase stage are utilized to obtain specific power-split ratios for the low insertion loss and high antenna-transmitter (ANT-TX) isolation. By using the unequal power split, the proposed QC is without the fundamental 3-dB loss seen in reciprocal ANT interfaces. Besides, to further enhance the TX-RX isolation within a wideband, a reconfigurable inter-stage matching network based on a varactor-tuned capacitor is implemented. To verify the mechanisms mentioned above, a reconfigurable wideband QC operating at 1.75–2.9 GHz is implemented and fabricated. The total power consumption is 224 mW. The measurement exhibits in-band TX-RX isolation of 27–58 dB. The TX-ANT and ANT-RX insertion losses are 4.3–5.0 dB and 1.0–1.9 dB, respectively. The QC also achieves the minimum in-band ANT-RX NF of 3.4 dB. Meanwhile, the measured TX-ANT and ANT-RX IIP3s are 39.4 and 32.5 dBm, respectively. The TX input P1dB is greater than 28.78 dBm, while the RX input P1dB is 23 dBm. The TX-induced ANT-RX P1dB is measured to be 28 dBm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A wideband hybrid mode-switching push–push oscillator with low phase noise is presented in this paper. To achieve the wide tuning range, the inductive and capacitive hybrid mode-switching technique is proposed for the first time. It introduces more freedom of design parameters (i.e., inductance and capacitance) in the resonant tank. Under certain tuning range requirement, the hybrid mode-switching oscillator achieves higher input impedance of the resonator compared to the conventional mode-switching oscillators. Meanwhile, a transformer-coupled inductor ring with symmetrical layout configuration is proposed to realize the switch-less hybrid mode switching, which further improves the circuit performance at sub-THz. Therefore, a good phase noise performance can be obtained within a wide tuning range, which leads to a relaxed tradeoff between the phase noise and tuning range. To verify the aforementioned mechanism operating at sub-THz band, a hybrid mode-switching oscillator based on the dual-mode push–push topology is proposed and fabricated in a conventional 28-nm CMOS technology. The measured results show a 21.7% tuning range with the center frequency of 169.6 GHz and a state-of-the-art FoMT of −180.6 dBc/Hz. The core circuit only occupies 0.039 mm2, while drawing 95 mW with a 0.9-V supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, two fully integrated digital power amplifiers (DPAs) intended for polar transmitters are proposed using a 40-nm CMOS technology, which achieve ultra wideband and high efficiency simultaneously. Firstly, the wideband Class-E power amplifier with nonideal characteristics is analyzed. Secondly, the design procedure of converting the nonideal Class-E model to a compact matching network is introduced for the on-chip implementation. Thirdly, the stacked-stepped-impedance transformer is utilized for the wideband output-matching network to improve the DPA power efficiency while tracking optimum load impedance. Finally, to enhance the saturated and back-off efficiency within a wideband, a novel feed-forward DPA architecture for a digital polar transmitter with multi-mode dynamic-matching (DM) network is firstly introduced and demonstrated. To verify the mechanism mentioned above, two DPAs are implemented and fabricated, which are the only reported wideband DPAs operating above 3 GHz with record fractional bandwidths, i.e., 92% and 100.8%, respectively. The proposed DPAs (i.e., DPA-I and DPA-II) exhibit peak output power of 22.2 and 22.3 dBm and peak drain efficiency of 46.2% and 47.4%, respectively, with a 1.2-V supply. In DM modes, the saturated and 6-dB back-off drain efficiency of DPA-II achieve maximum improvements of 7.5% and 5.7%, respectively. The core chip-sizes of the proposed DPAs (i.e., DPA-I and DPA-II) are 0.22 mm^2 and 0.24 mm^2, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]