Abstract :

The maximum operating frequency of CMOS has steadily increased over the past thirty years and extrapolations would predict THz circuits in CMOS soon. Compared to other technologies, CMOS does offer integration complexity paving the road for entire THz systems. As such, potential applications such as near-field scanning, quality control, spectroscopy and imaging could be pushed to the consumer market.

However, CMOS scaling also resulted into thinner interconnects with higher intrinsic resistance which in turn limits the maximum operating frequency. On the other hand, one could go beyond the fmax-limit by exploiting the non-linear behavior of a transistor. This concept is used already in frequency-doubler and -triplers and can be extended to entire transmitters and receivers. This talk will highlight some of these challenges when designing circuits in CMOS in the THz (300GHz-3THz) frequency band. Several examples in 40nm and 28nm CMOS at a frequency range from 200 to 620GHz will be discussed.

Bio: 

Patrick Reynaert was born in Wilrijk, Belgium, in 1976. He received the Master of Industrial Sciences in Electronics (ing.) from the Karel de Grote Hogeschool, Antwerpen, Belgium in 1998 and both the Master of Electrical Engineering (ir.) and the Ph.D. in Engineering Science (dr.) from the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium in 2001 and 2006 respectively.

During 2006-2007, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences of the University of California at Berkeley, with the support of a BAEF Francqui Fellowship. During the summer of 2007, he was a visiting researcher at Infineon, Villach, Austria.

Since October 2007, he is a Professor at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT-MICAS). His main research interests include mm-wave and THz CMOS circuit design, high-speed circuits and RF power amplifiers.

Patrick Reynaert is a Senior Member of the IEEE and chair of the IEEE SSCS Benelux Chapter. He serves or has served on the technical program committees of several international conferences including ISSCC, IEDM, ESSCIRC, RFIC, ICECS and PRIME. He has served as Associate Editor for Transactions on Circuits and Systems – I, and as Guest Editor for the Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

He received the 2011 TSMC-Europractice Innovation Award, the ESSCIRC-2011 Best Paper award and the 2014 2nd Bell Labs Prize.