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Title: Silicon-based Antenna and Circuit Co-Integration for Emerging RF/mm-Wave Applications
Committee:
Dr. Cressler, Advisor
Dr. Durgin, Chair
Dr. Peterson
Abstract: The objective of the proposed research is to develop and investigate the viability of co-integrated antennas and their driving electronics on the same silicon platform for emerging radio frequency (RF)/millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) applications. Existing RF and microwave systems are mostly assembled on the board level, using commercial off the shelf discrete components. While this allows greater design flexibility, transition losses and packaging complicate the overall system construction and complexity. Particularly for space-constrained applications like Internet-of-Things (IoT) radios or vehicles, board-level antennas/circuits can occupy a lot of area and may require elaborate integration techniques (e.g. multi-layer 3D integration). Furthermore, the antenna typically consumes the most area since it is much larger than its electronics at RF. On the other hand, the specifications of mm-Wave systems have driven towards higher operation frequencies, namely from 30 – 100 GHz, to provide better performance within an uncongested spectra. As the antenna size decreases as its operation frequency increases, there is a point where the antenna becomes comparable in size to its driving electronics. While a substantial amount of research has been studied in developing low-loss heterogeneous interconnects and highly efficient antenna-in-package techniques to merge the antenna and circuits, these methods require non-trivial processing that adds to the overall system and fabrication complexity. So far, current implementations of on-chip antennas are typically inefficient due to substrate losses and thus require other unique solutions like silicon lenses or high resistivity silicon substrates. To overcome these difficulties, practical techniques to co-integrate the antenna and circuits on the same silicon platform at RF/mm-Wave while maintaining high efficiency are proposed. The preliminary research demonstrates these co-integration design principles at RF. Then, the proposed research extends these practical co-integration concepts at mm-Wave on standard silicon processes by developing a high efficiency on-chip antenna and a highly co-integrated system-level transceiver with on-chip antenna.
