A Broadband CMOS Amplitude Detector for On-Chip RF Measurements

Author

Valdes-Garcia, Alberto ; Venkatasubramanian, Radhika ; Silva-Martinez, Jose ; Sánchez-Sinencio, Edgar

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Texas A&M Univ., College Station, TX

Volume

57

Issue

7

fYear

2008

fDate

7/1/2008 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1470

Lastpage

1477

Abstract

This paper presents a CMOS RF amplitude detector as a practical integrated test device and demonstrates its application for on-chip testing. The proposed circuit performs full-wave rectification and generates a dc voltage proportional to the amplitude of an RF signal over a wide frequency range. The design considerations and analysis of operation for the employed class-AB rectifier are described. Fabricated in a standard 0.35-mum CMOS process, the RF detector uses only 0.031 of area and presents an equivalent input capacitance of 13 fF. Measurements show that this RF test device has a detection dynamic range of 30 dB from 900 MHz to 2.4 GHz. Experimental results for the application of the RF amplitude detector in the built-in measurement of the gain and compression of a 1.6-GHz low-noise amplifier fabricated in the same chip are also presented.

Keywords

CMOS integrated circuits; UHF amplifiers; UHF integrated circuits; integrated circuit testing; low noise amplifiers; CMOS RF amplitude detector; broadband CMOS amplitude detector; class-AB rectifier; equivalent input capacitance; frequency 900 MHz to 2.4 GHz; full-wave rectification; integrated test device; low-noise amplifier; on-chip RF measurements; on-chip testing; Amplitude detector; CMOS radio frequency (RF) circuits; RF test; built-in self-test (BIST); full-wave rectifier;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Instrumentation and Measurement, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9456

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TIM.2008.917196

Filename

4459376