Cir­cuit De­sign 

IHP's Cir­cuit De­sign de­part­ment con­ducts re­search and de­vel­op­ment for silicon-​based broad­band and high-​frequency cir­cuits up to 500 GHz.

The Cir­cuit De­sign de­part­ment de­vel­ops and re­al­izes in­te­grated mi­crowave and millimeter-​wave cir­cuits, broad­band mixed-​signal cir­cuits and cir­cuits with high en­ergy ef­fi­ciency for com­mu­ni­ca­tion and sen­sor ap­pli­ca­tions.

The focus is on millimeter-​wave cir­cuits, trans­mit and re­ceive cir­cuits and frequence-​synthesizer for sys­tems with work­ing fre­quen­cies up to 720 GHz which are de­signed and man­u­fac­tured in IHP's cur­rent own SiGe-​​BiCMOS process.

The de­vel­op­ment of broad­band mixed-​signal cir­cuits con­cen­trates on ap­pli­ca­tions in fiberglass-​supported and wire­less broad­band com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Here, new con­cepts and elec­tronic cir­cuits for high­est datarates and thus ex­tremely large sig­nal band width are de­vel­oped.

Energy-​efficient HF trans­mit and re­ceive cir­cuits are de­vel­oped for their use in mo­bile elec­tronic ap­pli­ca­tions with bat­tery op­er­a­tion. Typ­i­cal ap­pli­ca­tion fields are com­mu­ni­ca­tion, lo­cal­iza­tion and sen­sor tech­nolo­gies. These cir­cuits are sup­ple­mented by an in­tel­li­gent, system-​specific power man­age­ment.

A fu­ture field of ac­tiv­ity for the de­part­ment is the de­vel­op­ment of in­te­grated cir­cuits for ultra-​fast analog-​digital and digital-​analog con­vert­ers with sam­pling rates in the GHz range. The ad­dressed ap­pli­ca­tions are in the di­rect syn­the­sis of high fre­quency sig­nals or in the dig­i­tal sig­nal pro­cess­ing of such HF sig­nals. Re­search and re­al­iza­tion of HF cir­cuits which cor­re­spond to the state-​of-the-art re­quire a con­stant de­vel­op­ment of de­sign meth­ods and de­sign tools. A focus is on, for ex­am­ple, the de­vel­op­ment of radiation-​hard cir­cuits for aero­space.

Tech­ni­cal Com­pe­ten­cies

• trans­ceiver cir­cuits with op­er­a­tional fre­quen­cies up to 540 GHz
• fre­quency syn­the­sizer show­ing very low phase noise
• wire­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion cir­cuits with ex­tremely high data rates (100 GBit/s and above)
• fiber-​optical com­mu­ni­ca­tion cir­cuits
• millimeter-​wave radar with high res­o­lu­tion für 2D- & 3D ap­pli­ca­tions
• Sub-​THz gas spec­troscopy cir­cuits
• millimeter-​wave sen­sors for bio- and med­ical ap­pli­ca­tions
• UWB RFICs for in­door lo­cal­iza­tion & nav­i­ga­tion as well as com­mu­ni­ca­tion
• ra­di­a­tion tol­er­ant cir­cuits for space ap­pli­ca­tions
• ultra-​fast A/D- & D/A-​converters
• energy-​efficient RF-​circuits for wire­less sen­sor net­works

Tech­ni­cal Basis

The fol­low­ing mea­sure­ment se­tups are being used:

• mea­sure­ment setup for radio fre­quency (RF) and mil­lime­ter wave (mmW) trans­ceiver cir­cuits
• fine placer for re­work and flip-​chip ap­pli­ca­tions
• wafer probe sta­tion
• mea­sure­ment setup for ultra-​wideband (UWB) trans­ceiver cir­cuits