A mixer-first sliding-IF architecture has been chosen by a PhD student to create a 300GHz radio receiver front-end using 300GHz Ft (450GHz Fmax) transistors from a 130nm SiGe BiCMOS process. According to the thesis of Sumit Singh, studying at University of Oulu in Finland, down-conversion of the 300GHz carrier is initially by a local oscillator at two-thirds of the carrier, ...
Imec unveiled a CMOS 56Gbit/s zero-IF D-band beam-forming transmitter at the IEEE RFIC Symposium in Washington. “It is a key component of a 4-way beamforming transceiver chip currently being developed by imec’s researchers,” according to the Belgian research lab. “With this technology, they aim to support the deployment of short-range wireless services at frequencies above 100GHz.” It sees Gbit/s communication ...
Researchers at the University of Michigan have made what is in effect a very agile ruler using a novel sub-THz radar technique, and reported it last week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference. Its 235GHz antennas and the core active components are integrated on a single IC, and across a desktop it measures the range to a target with sub-mm ...
Beams of electromagnetic radiation can be used to detect the rotation of distant objects if they have orbital angular momentum – known as ‘vortex waves’. It involves exploiting a rotational form of the Doppler effect, and researchers from University of Shanghai for Science and Technology (USST) have managed to get the technique working at terahertz (THz) frequencies. “To the best ...
Rohde & Schwarz is aiming at 6G and sub-THz research with W-band front-ends for an IF vector signal generator and a D-band thermal power sensor. SFI100A wideband IF vector signal generator The SFI100A wideband IF vector signal generator has been developed for early 6G research, high capacity wireless backhaul, fixed wireless access and automotive radar. With an RF modulation bandwidth ...
Tokyo Institute of Technology has created a Sub-THz 6G transceiver, which will be revealed next week at the VLSI Symposium. Capable of transmission and reception at over 100GHz, and at 112Gbit/s, “by effectively suppressing the self-interference caused by the transmission signal leaking into the receiver, the proposed architecture reaches unprecedented data rates while maintaining a surprisingly compact size”, according to ...
Researchers at Austrian university TU Wien (Vienna) have created a simple and compact source of terahertz radiation, claiming that radiates significantly more power than similar devices: 10μW at its 525GHz fundamental and 70μW at 330GHz. There are various ways to generate terahertz waves. TU Wien lists cryogenic quantum cascade lasers for high intensities, or down-conversion by mixing multiple optical lasers, ...
Plasmon-coupled semiconductor surface states can down-convert 1550nm optical wavelengths to terahertz frequencies four-orders of magnitude more efficiently than non-linear optical methods, according to UCLA. When a crystal is a semiconductor – p-doped InAs in this case – the ‘surface states’ created by the left-over bonds that are inevitable on the outside of a crystal lattice can create high gradient electric ...
In a silicon-compatible parallel to fibre optics, MIT is using polymer-based ribbon waveguides to carry data between chips at 105Gbit/s – waveguide dimensions and material are chosen so that it propagates electromagnetic radiation between 200 and 335GHz, over 300mm of waveguide. To handle suitable sub-Thz frequencies, transmitter and receiver were made on a 130nm SiGe BiCMOS process using largely bipolar transistors in ...
Princeton University has found a way to determine the direction to an object in three dimensions using only on-chip THz antennas with ~2°accuracy. It exploits frequency-dispersive leaky-wave antennas – end-fed strips, 1.7mm long, with transverse slots spaced at 43μm intervals. The crucial property of these, is that injecting a frequency between 360 and 400GHz into one end results in fan ...
Electronics Weekly Electronics Design & Components Tech News
