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This letter presents the design and characterization results of a multi-octave power amplifier fabricated in a 0.13μm SiGe-BiCMOS technology. The single stage power amplifier is implemented as the stack of a cascode amplifier combining broadband input matching network with resistive feedback, and a common-base amplifier with base capacitive feedback. Measurement results show that the design delivers a peak saturated output power level of 20.2 dBm, with output 1 dB compression at 19.4 dBm. The measured 3 dB power bandwidth is from 4 GHz to 32 GHz, covering three octaves. The corresponding power fractional bandwidth is 156 %. The measured peak power added efficiency is 20.6 %, and peak small signal gain is 18.6 dB. The fabricated integrated circuit occupies an area of 0.71mm2. To compare state-of-the-art multi-octave power amplifiers, the power amplifier figure of merit defined by the international technology roadmap for semiconductors is modified to include power fractional bandwidth and area. To the knowledge of the authors, the presented design achieves the highest figure of merit among multi-octave power amplifiers in a silicon based integrated circuit technology reported in literature.

Nowadays, there are a variety of different indoor positioning systems employing diverse techniques. Besides inertial navigation, most systems are based on ranging. For instance, techniques utilizing the Received Signal Strength (RSS), phase-difference, time of flight or time of arrival usually convert this information to distances, where trilateration is used to calculate the position. In contrast, approaches utilizing the Angle of Arrival (AoA) are commonly overlooked in literature. Within this paper, we present the hardware design for building such a system and give an outlook towards the algorithms to determine of the AoA. Preliminary measurements show the operability of the system., Proceedings of the 4th KuVS/GI Expert Talk on Localization

Nowadays, there are a variety of different indoor positioning systems, where some of them use communication hardware taking advantage of the Received Signal Strength (RSS) such as Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) or Bluetooth. These variants are employed if low cost is of primary importance. However, the accuracy provided is in the meter range. The alternative are positioning-tailored approaches like Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar, Ultra-WideBand (UWB) radar or phase-based positioning, which offer superior accuracy in the low decimetre range. If there is such a system in use, the question arises whether there is any improvement, if utilizing additional RSS measurements, which are performed by most systems anyway. With the help of the Cram´er-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB), this paper demonstrates that these additional readings can improve accuracy significantly, thus widen the application field for RSS from a low-budget only technique to enabling enhanced accurate positioning. To demonstrate this statement we compare the CRLB for Time of Arrival (ToA) with hybrid ToA/RSS. Our evaluations show that in practice the CRLB is approximately divided by two, if incorporating the RSS for each base station., Proceedings of the 3rd KuVS/GI Expert Talk on Localization, p. 25

This study presents a novel frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar system based on sub-harmonic generation, where a 24 GHz frequency divider-by-10 is used as an active reflector tag. A practical prototype is designed and fabricated on a GF45nm-Silicon on Insulator (SOI) technology for the 24 GHz building blocks, while a GF0.18 μm 7WL Bipolar Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (BiCMOS) technology was used for the 2.4 GHz receiver and baseband. System measurement results show that as opposed to conventional primary radars, the proposed system is immune to strong multi-path interferences resulting from direct reflections of the interrogating signal. The system achieves a ranging precision of 3.7 mm with loop measurements. Moreover, when measured in an indoor environment, the ranging results show a ranging precision and accuracy of 5.8 and 22.3 cm, respectively, which outperform other FMCW radars in the literature.

A K-band integrated super-regenerative amplifier (SRA) in a 130nm SiGe BiCMOS technology is designed and characterized. The circuit is based on a novel stacked transistor differential cross-coupled oscillator topology, with a controllable tail current for quenching the oscillations. The fabricated integrated circuit (IC) occupies an area of 0.63mm2, and operates at the free-running center frequency of 25.3 GHz. Characterization results show circuit operation from a minimum input power level required for a phase coherent output as −110 dBm, and the input power level corresponding to the linear to logarithmic mode transition of −85 dBm, the lowest reported for K-band integrated logarithmic mode SRAs to date to the knowledge of the authors. The measured output power is 7.8dBm into a 100 differential load. The power consumption of the circuit is 110mW with no quench signal applied, and 38mW with 30 % duty cycle quenching. The quench waveform designed for the reported measurement result is also discussed.

The design of a 24 GHz frequency divider-by-10 for accurate indoor localisation systems is presented. It is proposed to use frequency dividers as active reflector tags in a frequency-modulated continuous wave indoor localisation system in order to reduce interferences caused by direct reflections of the interrogating signal. Since frequency dividers are subharmonic generators, this allows achieving conversion gain in the reflected signal. The frequency divider is fabricated using GLOBAL FOUNDRIES 45 nm-silicon-on-insulator technology. It consumes only 5.7 mW from a 1 V supply. It has a wide locking range of 33% and an efficiency of 3.58 GHz/mW. To the best of authors' knowledge, the use of frequency dividers as active reflectors was not studied before.