From Transmission Lines to Transceivers: Silicon Millimeter-Wave ICs for 60GHz and Beyond

Scott Reynolds, Ph.D.,
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center,
Yorktown Heights, NY

This talk will give an overview of the millimeter-wave wireless IC design work in IBM Research. It will start with some basic millimeter-wave concepts and also discuss applications for millimeter-wave radios, such as wireless data transmission at multi-Gigabits per second. A 0.13 µm SiGe BiCMOS double-conversion superheterodyne receiver and transmitter chipset for data communications in the 60GHz band is then presented, discussing the radio architecture and some circuits. The chips have been packaged with planar antennas, and wireless transmission of uncompressed high-definition digital video at 2Gb/s has been demonstrated.

Scott K. Reynolds received the B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Michigan in 1983, the M.S.E.E. from Stanford University in 1984, and the Ph.D. in electrical engineering also from Stanford in 1987. He joined IBM in 1988 and is presently a Research Staff Member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. His job responsibilities have involved analog and mixed-signal circuit design for a wide variety of high-speed communication systems, both IBM products and research projects. Currently, he is engaged in development of CMOS and BiCMOS ICs for high-data-rate wired, RF wireless, and optical communication links. Along the way, he has authored and co-authored many patents and technical publications, including two papers on 60GHz wireless transceiver circuits which won the Lewis Winner Outstanding Paper Awards for the 2004 and 2006 International Solid-State Circuits Conferences.