CMOS phase shifter for conformal phased array beamformer applications

Abstract

A vector modulator based phase shifter is developed using 0.18um CMOS process at Sband frequency to be integrated into a conformal phased array antenna to recover the desired radiation pattern in the entire 360° range. The phase shifter has a variable gain amplifier integrated into the circuit in order to vary gain along with phase for precise control to correct the degraded radiation pattern due to the conformal shaping. The results show state-of-the-art performances including more than 7dB conversion gain with variable feature, a continuous phase rotation of 360° with steps as low as 11.25° and very low power consumption of 17mW, for the first time to the best of the authors' knowledge. The chip size including all pads is 1.5mm X 0.75mm. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly, I would like to thank my academic advisor, Dr. Debasis Dawn for his continuous support, patience and guidance in helping me complete my research work. I would also like to thank Alfonso Mendoza Radal for his support and guidance while working on my research work. ND NASA EPSCoR has supported this project under the agreement FAR0020852. I would like to thank Prof. Benjamin D.

A variable gain CMOS phase shifter for phased array antenna applications

“…A vector‐modulator, a passive hybrid, two active baluns and a variable gain amplifier (VGA) along with two buffer stages are integrated to build this unit‐cell CMOS phase shifter. As an advancement of the work in , in this work the proposed phase shifter architecture is fabricated and characterized to find out its suitability to be integrated with phased array antenna systems. The measurement results show that the proposed phase shifter has achieved simultaneous phase and gain control ability.…”