A novel noise optimization technique for inductively degenerated CMOS LNA

This paper proposes a novel noise optimization technique. The technique gives analytical formulae for the noise performance of inductively degenerated CMOS low noise amplifier (LNA) circuits with an ideal gate inductor for a fixed bias voltage and nonideal gate inductor for a fixed power dissipation, respectively, by mathematical analysis and reasonable approximation methods. LNA circuits with required noise figure can be designed effectively and rapidly just by using hand calculations of the proposed formulae. We design a 1.8 GHz LNA in a TSMC 0.25 pan CMOS process. The measured results show a noise figure of 1.6 dB with a forward gain of 14.4 dB at a power consumption of 5 mW, demonstrating that the designed LNA circuits can achieve low noise figure levels at low power dissipation.

VLSI architecture of a K-best detector for MIMO--OFDM wireless communication systems

The K-best detector is considered as a promising technique in the MIMO-OFDM detection because of its good performance and low complexity. In this paper, a new K-best VLSI architecture is presented. In the proposed architecture, the metric computation units (MCUs) expand each surviving path only to its partial branches, based on the novel expansion scheme, which can predetermine the branches' ascending order by their local distances. Then a distributed sorter sorts out the new K surviving paths from the expanded branches in pipelines. Compared to the conventional K-best scheme, the proposed architecture can approximately reduce fundamental operations by 50% and 75% for the 16-QAM and the 64-QAM cases, respectively, and, consequently, lower the demand on the hardware resource significantly. Simulation results prove that the proposed architecture can achieve a performance very similar to conventional K-best detectors. Hence, it is an efficient solution to the K-best detector's VLSI implementation for high-throughput MIMO-OFDM systems.

Calculation of Valence Subband Structures for Strained Quantum-Wells by Plane Wave Expansion Method Within 6 * 6 Luttinger-Kohn Model

The valence subband energies and wave functions of a tensile strained quantum well are calculated by the plane wave expansion method within the 6 * 6 Luttinger-Kohn model. The effect of the number and period of plane-waves used for expansion on the stability of energy eigenvalues is examined. For practical calculation, it should choose the period large sufficiently to ensure the envelope functions vanish at the boundary and the number of plane waves large enough to ensure the energy eigenvalues keep unchanged within a prescribed range.

Fabrication of semiconductor optical amplifiers and a novel gain measuring technique

The design and fabrication of 1550 nm semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) and the characteristics of the fabricated SOA are reported. A novel gain measurement technique based on the integrations of the product of emission spectrum and a phase function over one mode interval is proposed for Fabry-Perot semiconductor lasers.