UC San Diego

The exponential growth of demands of simultaneous, multiple, high-speed and high-volume data transfer opens the new era, called 4th Industrial Revolution. A new wave of the fifth generation mobile communication systems (5G) and its ancillary industries such as autonomous vehicle, Internet-of-Things (IoT) and low-latency remote medical monitoring demand unprecedented solutions for both software platform and hardware designs. The requirement of hardware design, especially, is more stringent since the frequency band utilized for 5G will be in millimeter-wave region (~30 GHz), which will be more than >10 times higher than what we have currently employed. The development of mm-wave integrated circuits (ICs), therefore, requires delicate characterization with sophisticated measurement and testing infrastructures. The research projects in this dissertation, in consequence, focus on different integrated mm-wave ICs for various instrumentation circuits and systems. These fully integrated mm-wave ICs were designed with the state-of-the-art performance considering the packaging effects (wirebond or flip-chip packaging) for wideband vector network analyzers (VNAs), signal generators, and modulator/demodulators.