Low Power RF Circuit Design

[Circuits]

Hello all,

I am a Graduate student and I am trying to find a problem on Low Power Circuits for my PhD thesis topic which I find very difficult and challenging.

I was working on high power circuits before and my problem definition was based on Power Amplifiers. Unfortunately, my advisor left in the middle and I am looking for new research topic under my new advisor. I read several low power RF transceivers and could not find any particular that I can focus on.

Main problem in low power circuits is to reduce the power dissipation and I see lot of papers talk about reducing power supply, current reuse techniques, working in sub-threshold and moderate inversion regions but I need some help and suggestions with it.

I would really really appreciate any type of suggestions and help with it. I am just trying to get a broad view of it.


Thank you.

 

[mtwieg]

Are you looking at CMOS system-level design (as in doing an entire transceiver chain on chip), or at MMIC design of block-level circuits (like individual LNAs, PAs, mixers, filters, etc)?

 

[Circuits]

I am looking for whole Transceiver Design on chip. I have started with LNA already (Common Gate double gm enhancement Design) to improve its design. But, I do not have a clear problem definition yet.


Thank you.

- - - Updated - - -

I want to add one more thing to my statement. " I do not know right now what is right way of approaching it. so I started with one block of Receiver and trying to see how can I improve it. In addition to that I am also reading Receiver /Transmitter architectures and looking for different types of problems in them"

 

[mtwieg]

There's a lot of interesting work being done on ultra high bandwidth or highly configurable transceiver front ends. Here are a few IEEE papers I came across recently to give some ideas:
A 60GHz 16QAM/8PSK/QPSK/BPSK direct-conversion transceiver for IEEE 802.15.3c
A low-power process-scalable superheterodyne receiver with integrated high-Q filters
Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE polar loop transmitter

The stuff about N-path RF tuning is pretty groundbreaking, and shows that people are completely redefining the way RF systems can be implemented.

 

[Circuits]

Thank you very much for your advice. I had deleted my option for heterodyne receivers. I will definitely look into it in more detail.

What do you suggest about Regenerative Receivers for low power design? I know , stability is a big concern in these receivers but ideally it has only one active device in it , hence less power dissipation.

I want to finish my PhD in next 2.5 years and want to pick something which is reasonable and doable. Unfortunately, I am working on my own.
Do you suggest , block wise design would be a wise choice ? As I said ,I have started on CG LNA for Biomedical applications and looking at improving the design by reducing the POWER DISSIPATION.

Please advice.