Summary: RF power amplifiers have received a great deal of attention and development effort over the last decade, mainly due to the challenging requirements of the wireless communications industry. This effort has not only led to some impressive progress in PA performance, it has also led to some revisions and rethinking in traditional PA theory. this course will highlight how these developments will undoubtedly have an impact on PA design in all application areas, including but not restricted to wireless communications.

Summary: The accuracy of Vector-Network-Analyzer (VNA) measurements depends critically on calibration and error correction techniques. This course will cover the evolution of conventional VNA calibration methods from the start of network analysis through the development of new calibration methods for waveform and large-signal analysis.

Summary: As today's ubiquitous wireless devices decrease in size, there is an increasing demand for physically smaller antennas, yet the performance requirements are rarely relaxed. Optimizing the performance properties of electrically small antennas represents a significant design challenge for the antenna engineer. This course provides a discussion on the fundamental theory, challenges and performance trade-offs associated with the design of electrically small antennas. The course begins with a brief overview of the basic theory and concepts associated with electrically small antennas. This segment of the presentation provides an understanding of antenna performance limitations in terms of impedance, radiation patterns, bandwidth, efficiency, and quality factor. Techniques used to design self-resonant electrically small antennas are described and compared. These include dielectric loading, linear loading (increasing wire length), top-loading, and "folded" configurations. The relationship between the antenna¿s performance characteristics and its physical properties is discussed. Issues such as the significance of antenna geometry are considered. The performance of the small antenna on small finite ground planes is considered with a particular emphasis on how the antenna¿s location on the ground plane affects impedance, pattern and polarization properties. The lecture concludes with a discussion on recent advances made in the design of low profile, conformal and integrated device antennas.

Summary: The objective of this course is to provide a state of the art review of phase locked loop circuits and applications from a design and development perspective. Intended for RF and Microwave Engineers, the course details out the design and development of phase locked loop circuits. Topics include PLL basics, VCOs, phase detectors, open and close loop characterization, loop filter design, and phase noise concepts. Examples will be given to a variety of problems relevant to the design of phase locked loops.

Summary: This is a hot topic due to immediate demand from industry. However, the key design issues are often ignored, in particular by the students. In this course, these issues will be highlighted from an application point of view. The theoretical analysis is also given to help students understand the broadband radiation behavior well. The following is the abstract of the course.
The research and development of ultra-wideband (UWB) technology has greatly spurred the design of small broadband antennas. The requirements for the UWB antennas include consistent impedance and radiation performance over an ultra-wide bandwidth of 3.1-4.8GHz/6-10.6GHz/3.1-10.6GHz. The miniaturization of the antennas becomes the most critical design challenges in commercial UWB systems such as high-speed wireless USB dongles. This course reviews the development of the small UWB antennas. The key design issues of the UWB antennas such as planar printed UWB antennas are highlighted. The new techniques to reduce the effect of ground plane on the antenna performance, further miniaturize antenna, co-design antenna with RF filters are elaborated. The latest applications of small printed antennas in wireless UWB systems are described in brief.

Summary: The role of Radio-Frequency (RF) Power Amplifiers (PAs) in today's and tomorrow's consumer and state-of-the-art electronics is crucial, catering to the stringent performance (i.e., linearity and output power) and real-estate (i.e., size) requirements of portable systems and the power limitations of battery-powered applications. Key to the success of any portable device is battery life (or runtime), and PAs can be a significant and detrimental load in this regard, especially because they capture a significant portion of the total power budget and they characteristically have poor power efficiencies. This course will address the advent of dynamically adaptive biasing schemes in PA applications to increase power efficiencies, which is generally done by essentially transforming and redefining the operating environment of the PA for maximum performance at optimum power levels, and consequently prolonging battery life. After completing this course you should be able to develop an understanding of dynamically adaptive biasing schemes in PA applications.

Summary: Various RF bands, standards, modulation schemes, duplex mechanisms and signal bandwidths needed for the mobile terminal call for a highly adaptable and reconfigurable RF receiver. The biggest bottleneck in achieving this goal lies with the RF pre-select filter at the antenna, which is band specific and creates a bottleneck in being able to share the hardware. Solving this "multi-band" programmability is the biggest challenge in achieving a RF Receiver for software defined radio. A few of the possible architectures and their limitations are presented. However, designing a "multi-mode" RF receiver for a given RF band with highly reconfigurable performance is an achievable goal. A WCDMA/EDGE receiver without inter-stage SAW filter in 90nm digital CMOS is used as an example in illustrating the architecture, circuit and system considerations for such a receiver.

Summary: This tutorial provides an overview of the different requirements for RF filters in next generation multi-band multi-standard radio platforms. It also presents the required RF filter characteristics in relation to 3G radio performance parameters and system requirements.

Summary: In typical radio-frequency (RF) front-end circuits, the passive components outnumber the active devices. They occupy a major fraction of the total circuit area, and their low quality factor (Q) limits the circuit performance. Furthermore, these (intended) passive components can easily be perturbed by the interconnects feeding into them and coupled together by the (unintended) magnetic fields around those interconnects, or by (unintended) capacitive currents through the silicon substrate. One therefore needs to cope with both the optimization of the passive components, as far as Q and chip area consumption go, and the minimization of the crosstalk effects. This tutorial illustrates the design principles that lead to optimized integrated passive components on the basis of maximum Q and optimum RF isolation. Taking the well-established hybrid RF systems on printed circuit board (PCB) as a reference, the most commonly used passive components are discussed, and RF isolation techniques at chip and package level are explained.

Summary: This course reviews key RF transmitter power amplifier linearization issues. The underlying power amplifier nonlinearity problem, that of the competing requirements of power amplifier efficiency and linear signal transmission paths for bandwidth efficient, modulation-complex signals, is presented, together with the linearization solution. Modern linearization schemes and where linearization research, and technology, is headed is addressed.

Summary: This course reviews the present-day on-chip wiring design practices and the special characteristics of on-chip lossy transmission lines. The deficiencies of present-day RC-circuit-representation-based designs and tools are highlighted through relevant examples. Guidelines are given for how to use controlled transmission line structures and design practices are discussed for best optimizing the wiring structure and design methodologies to circumvent the negative effects and best utilize the transmission line properties in the framework of improved technological advances. CAD tool development needs are explained for wire-aware chip architecture and for migrating to performance-driven routers and layout with R(f)L(f)C interconnect representation. The large, integrated chips that are including major portions of the overall system are inheriting all the problems that package designers have faced for many years. It is explained how the system-on-chip concept needs to adopt and adapt the tools, understanding, and practices used for designing chip-to-chip interconnections.

Summary: This course delves further into the present-day on-chip wiring design practices and the special characteristics of on-chip lossy transmission lines. A new technique is described for reducing computational complexity and improving accuracy of combined power distribution and interconnect noise prediction for wide, on-chip data-buses. The methodology uses lossy transmission-line power-blocks with frequency-dependent properties and the interaction between delta-I noise, common-mode noise, and crosstalk and their effect on timing is illustrated with simulations using representative driver and receiver circuits and on-chip interconnections.