Physics Seminar: "Si/SiGe BiCMOS Microsystems for Microwave and Millimeter-Wave Sensing and Communications" by Professor Hermann Schumacher

Monday, May 19, 2014, 3 pm to 4 pm
Campus: 
Dayton
204 Fawcett Hall
Audience: 
Future Students
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Physics Department Seminar

Monday, May 19, 2014
3:00 pm in 204 Fawcett Hall

Si/SiGe BiCMOS Microsystems for Microwave and Millimeter-Wave Sensing and Communications
Presented by Professor Hermann Schumacher, Institute of Electron Devices and Circuits, Ulm University, Germany
Email: hschu@ieee.org
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Since the early 1990’s, Silicon-Germanium heterojunction bipolar transistors revolutionized the way we build microwave and millimeter wave systems. Rivaling the once-dominant group III-V semiconductor devices in terms of speed, SiGe technologies also harness the maturity, yield and resulting complexity of Silicon based technology. The presentation will discuss this trend using examples from the author’s research in recent years.

The first example will show how a very inexpensive and „old“ SiGe HBT technology (0.8 μm feature size) was used to implement efficient impulse radio ultra-wideband (IUWB) sensors for vital sign detection and object tracking.

The second example, taken from a recently concluded major European research project, discusses how RFMEMS components were included in a state-of-the-art Si/SiGe BiCMOS process to realize band-switchable millimeter-wave ICs, and finally a complex integrated circuit which introduces active phase and amplitude control to a reflect array antenna. The IC contains four reversible T/R modules, digital to analog converters offering eight bit control, and a joint I2C control interface.

The final example is taken from an on-going large European research project and shows how advanced Si/SiGe BiCMOS processes (130 nm feature size) can be used to establish a front-end for a 140 GHz MIMO radar system intended for security scanning of baggage. The presentation will include proof-of-concept sensing experiments, while the full MIMO radar system is the object of on-going research work.

Light refreshments will be served.

For information, contact
Abbey Brown
Chair, Physics
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