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Apoorva Bhatia
(From: IIT Mandi; To: Texas Instruments, Bangalore)
Conference Publications
- Apoorva Bhatia, Yogesh Darwhekar, Subhashish Mukherjee, Samuel Martin, and Nagendra Krishnapura, "A 52dB Spurious-Free Dynamic Range Ku-Band LNA-Mixer in a 130nm SiGe BiCMOS Process," 2020 International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), Seville, Spain, May 2020.
Thesis
Title: Design and Analysis of LNA and Mixer for Millimeter-wave Receivers
The telecom industry is heading fast towards 5th generation wireless to start deployment in the next 2–3 years. Thus, 5G transceivers are required for the 27 GHz–40 GHz frequency range. This work aims at designing and analyzing some fundamental blocks of the receiver chain for the Ku (10 GHz–20 GHz) and Ka (26.5 GHz–40 GHz) bands.
At high frequencies, parasitics begin to dominate impedances at various nodes because of which obtaining high gains and low noise figures becomes a challenge. Single-stage and two-stage low-noise amplifiers (LNA) have been proposed to obtain power matching as well as noise matching at 18 GHz and 28 GHz. They achieve a sub‑2 dB and sub‑4 dB noise figures at 16 GHz and 28 GHz respectively. Mixers are usually designed for either low noise figure or high linearity. Hence, the spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) cannot be increased a lot. Also, the structures need to be compact at high frequencies to avoid stability issues. The work proposes a transformer-coupled mixer to reduce signal power loss and stability issues and offer a high SFDR. Also, a simple technique is proposed to reduce the image band gain for improving the NF. The combination of LNA and the heterodyne mixer provides a noise figure of 3.5 dB with 50 dB SFDR at 16 GHz input frequency and 4 GHz intermediate frequency.