|
Bin Wan
Carnegie Mellon University |
Reconfigurable RF Circuits Using Phase-Change Materials
The proliferation of wireless devices has introduced many different wireless standards. Each of these standards has their own particular center frequency and performance specifications. Traditionally, each RF transceiver front-end can only operate to support one of these standards, or even one band within the standard, thus requiring multiple similar circuit blocks, particularly the LNA and VCO, for multi-band operations. Recent works have introduced circuits, such as the wideband LNA, to allow a single receiver to operate at different frequency bands. However, in wideband circuits, there is a significant trade-off between bandwidth and gain and a more complicated front-end selection filter being used to suppress interference signal across the bandwidth.
In this talk, I propose a new type of configurable RF circuits using phase-change materials vias. With the integration of phase-change material into standard CMOS, we can design RF building blocks using configurable inductors, capacitors, transistors and even circuit topologies after manufacturing that offer multiple reconfigurable bands of operations, superior performance, and save considerable area and power.
Bin Wan received his B.S. from University of Texas at Austin in 2004 and M.S. from Cornell University in 2006, all in Electrical and Computer Engineering. From 2005 to 2006, he was at IBM STI Design Center in Austin, Texas and worked on Phase Locked Loops for the Cell processor. Currently he is a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University under Prof. Larry Pileggi. His research interests are in high-speed and configurable analog/RF circuit design.
|
