Mitigation of Total Dose Performance Degradation in an 8-18 GHz SiGe Reconfigurable Receiver

• Published in: IEEE transactions on nuclear science Vol. 61; no. 6; pp. 3226 - 3235
• Main Authors: Howard, Duane C., Cardoso, Adilson S., Fleetwood, Zachary E., Lourenco, Nelson E., England, Troy D., Saha, Prabir K., Shankar, Subramaniam, Diestelhorst, Ryan M., En Xia Zhang, Cher Xuan Zhang, Paki-Amouzou, Pauline, Cressler, John D.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.12.2014; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: BiCMOS integrated circuits; Built-in self-test; Degradation; Integrated circuit testing; MIMICs; Receivers; Silicon germanium; System-on-chip
• ISSN: 0018-9499; 1558-1578
• DOI: 10.1109/TNS.2014.2364580

An 8-18 GHz receiver implemented in silicon-germanium (SiGe) BiCMOS technology is presented. The receiver is designed to enable built-in test (BIT) and consists of a low noise amplifier (LNA), an image-reject mixer, on-chip, automatic gain control (AGC), ring oscillator (RO) sources (used to provide test signals of a predefined amplitude), and digital-to-analog converters (DACs), used for DC bias control of the blocks. The voltage and current biases of both the LNA and the mixer circuit blocks are used as tuning knobs for radio frequency (RF) performance metrics to mitigate the negative effects of total ionizing dose (TID) radiation damage present in extreme environments such as space. Samples of the receiver die were exposed to 10 keV X-rays at 1, 3, and 6 Mrad( SiO2) doses. The BIT system was able to mitigate for TID damage in most cases, with improvements in the key RF metrics of gain, output third-order intercept point (OIP3), and noise figure (NF). The receiver was fabricated in an 0.18 μm SiGe BiCMOS process technology with a peak fT of 150 GHz and nominally consumes 241-243 mA from a 4 V supply.