A transmitter design for 5GHz wireless LAN applications

Abstract

This thesis presents a 5GHz wireless LAN transmitter front-end including VCO using frequency-tripling scheme. Up-conversion mixer and driver amplifier for IEEE 802.11a Wireless LAN application are designed and fabricated on 0.18 $\mum$ CMOS technology. The proposed up-conversion mixer adopts source degeneration transconductance stage to control the conversion gain, and driver amplifier uses cascode topology to control the gain and linearity. The fabricated up-mixer shows -6 ~ 10 dB of conversion gain and - 18.5 dBm of $OP_{-1dB}$ at 10 dB gain, and the driver amplifier shows -8 ~ 8 dB of power gain and 2 dBm of $OP_{-1dB}$at 6 dB gain. The up-mixer and the driver amplifier consume 6mA and 9mA from 1.8 V supply, respectively. Using M-th frequency generation technique 5 GHz frequency tripler is implemented based on 0.18 $\mum$ CMOS technology. After the frequency triple scheme, the output frequency is 5.28GHz, and the output power is 4.5 dBm. The rejection with other first and second harmonic is higher than 30dBc. The frequency tripler dissipates 35mW under 1.8v supply.