Proceedings of 2015 Photonics & Electromagnetics Research Symposium, Prague, July 6 - 9,Page(s)2805-2808
Abstract
Electronically tunable capacitors are key elements for tunable and reconfigurable
RF circuits. The most popular tunable capacitor topologies in CMOS are the analog varactor
and digitally controlled switched capacitor array (SCA). The conventional analog varactor shows
a high quality factor (Q-factor) in both the minimum capacitance (Cmin ) and the maximum
capacitance (Cmax ) states with a wide tuning range, but it has a poor linearity performance due
to the voltage dependent nonlinear capacitance. In case of the digitally controlled SCA, while
it shows a very good linearity, its Q-factor in Cmin state is strongly dependent on the substrate
loss by the parasitic junction capacitances between P -well, deep N -well, and P -substrate and
the substrate resistance. Especially, if the SCA is implemented in a standard digital CMOS
process without deep N -well, it suffers from severe Q-factor degradation in Cmin state at higher
frequencies. In order to overcome the aforementioned drawbacks of the analog varactor and the
digitally controlled SCA, the digitally controlled binary-weighted accumulation-mode varactor
array (AVA) is proposed. Contrast to the conventional analog varactor tuned by continuous
analog voltage, the proposed AVA uses only two states of Cmin and Cmax of the analog varactor
by digitally on/off control. Instead of a zero voltage reference, the negative voltage (-VDD) is
applied to the gate of the analog varactor in Cmin state in order to maximize the tuning range,
power handling capability, and linearity. The total capacitance varies by turning on (+VDD)
or off (-VDD) each branch of the proposed AVA. The proposed AVA keeps a high Q-factor in
all states even if it is implemented in a standard digital CMOS process without deep N -well,
while showing comparable linearity performance in comparison with the conventional SCA. In
simulation, Q-factor at 2.4 GHz is greater than 70 over all states and the tuning range is about
3.1.
Citation
Donggu Im,
and
Sanggil Kim,
"A High-Q Linear CMOS Digitally Controlled Accumulation-mode Varactor Array for Multiband RF Circuits," Proceedings of 2015 Photonics & Electromagnetics Research Symposium, Prague, July 6 - 9,Page(s)2805-2808