Electrical & Computer Engineering     |     Carnegie Mellon

Tuesday, March 31, 12:00-1:00 p.m. HH-1112

 

Cheng-Yuan Wen
Cheng-Yuan Wen
Carnegie Mellon University

Phase Change Reconfigurable Inductor Design and Analysis

Due to the desire of area-efficient RF front-end circuits, exploiting frequency selectable topologies of RF transceivers are becoming necessary. In order to make RF circuits operate at multiple frequencies, tunable matching networks are required. Different techniques applying CMOS switches or MEMS switches to build variable RF inductors have been investigated in literatures. CMOS switches usually introduce large parasitics thus deteriorating the quality factor while MEMS switches are usually very area hungry and need to be accomplished by a complex actuation scheme. Therefore, building a wide tuning range and low loss variable inductors is becoming highly challenging.

In this talk, a new method of building variable inductors using phase-change materials will be presented. Phase-change material contains alternative resistivity that can be switched back and forth by changing the state of the material. Thus it becomes a good candidate of being a switch that can be embedded in a standard CMOS process. Due to the less parasitics of phase-change switches and the compatibility with a standard CMOS process, this variable inductor can provide a better performance compared with other switch based schemes. The idea and the procedure of designing a phase-change reconfigurable inductor will be described and the measured results and performance will be assessed in this talk.

Bio:

Cheng-Yuan Wen received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from National Tsing-Hua University (NTHU), Hsinchu Taiwan in 2004 and the M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2006, respectively.

He is currently a PhD student in the ECE Department working with Prof. Jeyanandh Paramesh and Prof. Larry Pileggi. His research focuses on the design and development of RF passive components and circuits employing phase-change materials.