A traditional first course on Radio Frequency (RF) Integrated Circuit (IC) course (EE619: RF Microelectronics Chip Design) covers foundational RF concepts and the design of basic RF building blocks. This advanced course will build on these foundations and familiarize students with the design principles and practices of modern 5G wireless communication transceivers implemented in fully integrated form in nanoscale CMOS technology. A major part of the course will cover the fundamentals of multi-antenna transceiver design commonly employed at mm-wave frequencies (>30 GHz), where the design of phased-array systems and their constituent building blocks will be covered.

Part I (Foundations – 35% of the lectures):

Part II (mm-wave IC design – 65% of the lectures):

This part of the course will build on the concepts developed in Part I and cover the fundamentals of multi-antenna transceiver design at mm-wave frequencies. Topics that will be covered include:

Students will be assigned a multi-stage design project, featuring a study of system requirements and translation to circuit design specifications, followed by hand-analysis/behavioural-modelling, transistor-level circuit design, layout design and characterization electromagnetic structures, and finally post-layout characterization.

Text/References:

1. RF Microelectronics, Behzad Razavi, 2nd Edition, 2012 onwards, Pearson Education, Inc.
2. Electromagnetics for High-Speed Analog and Digital Communication Circuits, Ali Niknejad, 1st Edition, 2007, Cambridge University Press.
3. Microwave Engineering – David M. Pozar, 4th Edition, 2012 onwards, Wiley.
4. Design of Analog CMOS Integrated Circuits, Behzad Razavi, McGraw Hill Education, Second edition, 2017 onwards, McGraw Hill Education (India) Private Limited.
5. IEEE papers referenced in the class will be provided by the instructor.