lecture material

You will find the lecture material as well as announcements in the Illias course.

Description

Modern day RF systems are driven to be smaller and more compact, to allow devices like smartphones or smarwatches to have multiple RF modems for LTE, 5G, Bluetooth, NFC, GPS and other communications standards. To achieve the necessary integration density Monolithical Microwave Integrated Circuits(MMIC) are build, which combine all necessary components of the RF frontend into one IC. In this lab we will dive into designing MMICs for a 5G base station in the n257 band, which operates from 26.5 GHz to 29.5 GHz.

Starting easy the software Cadence Virtuoso is introduced and several RF design tasks done. After three weeks you will decide on a component of the transceiver archtiecture and try to build a tape-out ready design of this component. 

Your grade consists of 75% of your work and 25% of an oral exam at the end of the lecture period.

It is recommended to have done the courses RFE, RFIC and MRSE prior to this as the knowledge from these courses is used extensively in this lab. You will propably invest quite some time with this lab, as it is challenging. The reward is a true real world design experience of state of the art technology. Further, the best designs have a chance to actually be manufactured and measured by yourself in the next semesters Team Project: Sensors and Electronics.

The course will be held Mondays from 14:00 - 18:00. You will access the software and design kits by connecting to our server. This necessitates either a VPN connection or being in the university network as well as a Windows, Linux or Mac computer.