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This paper presents artificial-synthesized edge-coupled transmission lines (TLs) based on complementary metal- oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. The artificial coupled-line (CL), the so-called the complementary-conducting-strip coupled line (CCS CL), consists of the unit cell and is meandered in the 2-D plane. The unit cell, whose dimensions are much smaller than the guiding wavelength at the operating frequency, provides five structural parameters for CL syntheses. The synthesized CLs, which are fully characterized by using theoretical and experimental procedures, reveal the following unique guiding properties. First, the coupling coefficient (K) can be 7.7% higher than that of the meandered conventional edged-coupled TLs. Second, the even- and odd-mode propagation constants can be synthesized as identical at the same time. Two backward-wave directional couplers for achieving the tight coupling and high directivity are designed by incorporating artificial CCS CL. Two prototypes are fabricated by the standard 0.18-μm CMOS technology, occupying the chip areas of 120.0 μm × 240.0 ×m. The measured results show that the isolation is higher than 25.0 dB from 10.0 to 40.0 GHz with a coupling of 14.4 dB. On the tight coupler design, the through and coupling are 4.65 ±0.15 dB from 30.0 to 40.0 GHz with an amplitude imbalance of less than 0.3 dB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an X-band CMOS single chip integrating 16 building blocks is developed for frequency modulation continuous wave radar application. The quadrature and monopulse transceiver consists of a voltage-controlled oscillator, amplifiers, Wilkinson power dividers, 90° hybrid low-noise amplifiers, rat-race hybrid, a single-pole double-throw, switch, an active bandpass filter (BPF), and mixers. The transceiver is fabricated in a standard mixed-signal/RF bulk 0.18-μm CMOS technology with a chip area of 2.6 mm x 3.3 mm, including contact pads. The transceiver is implemented by meandered complementary-conducting-strip transmission lines demonstrating their capability of miniaturizing circuits such as 90° hybrid and rat-race hybrid with 95% and 98% size reduction compared to the prototype designs, respectively. The active BPF consumes 4.5 mW achieving 0.dB insertion loss at the passband. The total power consumption of the transceiver is 0.35 W. Output power of the transmitter is 1 dBm with a 35-dB second harmonic suppression. Moreover, the on-chip isolations between T/R in this compacted transceiver are more than 60 dB. The measured receiver gain and NF are --4.5 and 11.5 dB, respectively. Finally, the obtained in-phase and quadrature signals demonstrate 0.6-dB amplitude and 70 phase imbalance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a fully monolithic transmission-line-based active bandpass filter (BPF) fabricated in a 0.18-μm standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology. The half-wavelength resonators are realized by synthetic quasi-TEM complementary conducting-strip transmission lines (CCS TLs). To lower the insertion loss of the BPF, the differential nMOS cross-coupled pairs are combined with the parallel resonators. Besides, the active devices and CCS TLs are vertically integrated on the standard CMOS substrate. The Q-enhanced resonator, which is comprised of a CCS TL and an nMOS cross-coupled pair, is theoretically investigated. Simulation results indicate that the Q factor of the resonator can be increased from 3.4 to 84.0 at 6.53 GHz. Additionally, the prototype of the second-order BPF occupies an area of 1230 μm × 880 μm, and the measured results demonstrate that the center frequency is 6.02 GHz with a bandwidth of 1.14 GHz. The PadB and insertion loss are -15.2 dBm and 2.2 dB, respectively, when the BPF consumes 3.0 mA from a 1.8-V supply. A two-port noisy network is also reported to examine the noise figure (NF) of the proposed BPF. Theoretical results reveal that the NF is 11.38 dB at 6.0 GHz, with a difference of less than 7.2% among the measured data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]