Prof. Carlos Saavedra of Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

The reigning design paradigm for microwave transceivers is to divide and conquer: the engineer first designs and optimizes the individual components (e.g. the amplifiers, the mixers, the oscillators) and then he or she interconnects those components to create the transceiver. Undoubtedly, this design paradigm has been enormously powerful. Nevertheless, there are important benefits to be gained by adopting a more integrated design approach. More specifically, the concept is to merge some of the blocks of the transceiver and to design those blocks as a single unit. Stated another way, the idea is to divide less and conquer more at the component level. Some of the benefits of this latter design approach can include reduced chip area, reduced power consumption, or an improvement in a specific performance metric. One of the central components of a communications transceiver is the frequency converter, or mixer, because it is responsible for upconverting and downconverting the information-bearing signal. When a mixer is combined with the local oscillator circuit, for example, the result is a new circuit known as a self-oscillating mixer (SOM). This talk will focus on innovative ways to merge the mixer with other components that typically surround the mixer in a transceiver. Three CMOS mixer RFIC designs will be described together with measured results. Those circuits are: a mixer-LNA with an average DSB noise figure of 3.9 dB, a dual-band SOM capable of operating at C-band and X-band, and a 12-GHz variable conversion gain mixer.

Biography: Carlos Saavedra obtained the Ph.D. degree from Cornell University in 1998. From 1998 to 2000 he was a Senior Microwave Engineer at Millitech Corporation, South Deerfield, Massachusetts. Since the year 2000 he has been with Queen's University in Canada. He is the Chair of the MTT-S Technical Coordinating Committee 22 on Signal Generation and frequency Conversion, he is a member of the Steering Committee of the 2012 IEEE International Microwave Symposium and he served on the Technical Program Committee of the IEEE RFIC Symposium from 2008-2011.

Email:

Address:Walter Light Hall, Room 406, 19 Union Street, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, K7L 3N6

Prof. Carlos Saavedra of Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

Biography:

Email:

Address:Kingston, Ontario, Canada