A Broadband Active Microwave Monolithically Integrated Circuit Balun in Graphene Technology

Dalal Fadil,Wlodek Strupinski,Emiliano Pallecchi,Sebastien Fregonese,Max C Lemme,Di Zhou,Thomas Zimmer,Wei Wei,Soukaina Ben Salk,Vikram Passi,Henri Happy

doi:10.3390/app10062183

Abstract

This paper presents the first graphene radiofrequency (RF) monolithic integrated balun circuit. It is composed of four integrated graphene field effect transistors (GFETs). This innovative active balun concept takes advantage of the GFET ambipolar behavior. It is realized using an advanced silicon carbide (SiC) based bilayer graphene FET technology having RF performances of about 20 GHz. Balun circuit measurement demonstrates its high frequency capability. An upper limit of 6 GHz has been achieved when considering a phase difference lower than 10° and a magnitude of amplitude imbalance less than 0.5 dB. Hence, this circuit topology shows excellent performance with large broadband performance and a functionality of up to one-third of the transit frequency of the transistor.

Highlights

Research in graphene electronics has been extensively directed to the development of RF transistors [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
Some RF and millimeter wave circuits based on graphene transistors have been reported with a low noise amplifier (LNA) and a mixer working around 10 to 20 GHz [10], ring oscillator [11,12], graphene radio frequency receiver integrated circuit [13], and a 200 GHz integrated resistive subharmonic mixer based on a single chemical vapor deposition (CVD) G-FET [2]
In [15], we proposed two balun architectures based on graphene FET specificities

Summary

Introduction

Research in graphene electronics has been extensively directed to the development of RF transistors [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. Some RF and millimeter wave circuits based on graphene transistors have been reported with a low noise amplifier (LNA) and a mixer working around 10 to 20 GHz [10], ring oscillator [11,12], graphene radio frequency receiver integrated circuit [13], and a 200 GHz integrated resistive subharmonic mixer based on a single chemical vapor deposition (CVD) G-FET [2]. One of the key concepts for circuit design at very high frequency is the use of differential electronic signals [14]. At millimeter-wave frequencies, the differential topologies alleviate the negative impact of the bonding wire inductance or the flip-chip bump inductance on the gain, the output power, and the stability of amplifiers [14]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion