A New Automatic Compensation Network for System-on-Chip Transceivers

Abstract

This paper proposes a new automatic compensation network (ACN) for a system-on-chip (SoC) transceiver. We built a 5 GHz low noise amplifier (LNA) with an onchip ACN using 0.18 μm SiGe technology. This network is extremely useful for today’s radio frequency (RF) integrated circuit devices in a complete RF transceiver environment. The network comprises an RF design-fortestability (DFT) circuit, capacitor mirror banks, and a digital signal processor. The RF DFT circuit consists of a test amplifier and RF peak detectors. The RF DFT circuit helps the network to provide DC output voltages, which makes the compensation network automatic. The proposed technique utilizes output DC voltage measurements and these measured values are translated into the LNA specifications such as input impedance, gain, and noise figure using the developed mathematical equations. The ACN automatically adjusts the performance of the 5 GHz LNA with the processor in the SoC transceiver when the LNA goes out of the normal range of operation. The ACN compensates abnormal operation due to unusual thermal variation or unusual process variation. The ACN is simple, inexpensive and suitable for a complete RF transceiver environment.