The field of electronic telecommunications has experienced explosive growth in the past ten years, both in terms of its commercial importance and in terms of the research effort devoted to it in academic and industrial laboratories. It appears likely that radio-based digital communications will play a much larger role than might have been anticipated, complementing data communications on wire pairs with fiber media coming into increased use for data communications backbones. As in the past, the utilization of VLSI technology to reduce the cost of electronics associated with such systems will be critical. This research is directed at exploring new ways to use silicon integrated circuit technology to improve the performance, reduce the power dissipation, and reduce the cost of components for communication systems of various kinds, with primary emphasis on data communications and Personal Communications Systems (PCS) using radio and free-space optical media. Particular emphasis is placed on circuit techniques applicable to implementation of RF, IF and baseband mixed signal communications circuits with low power and low operating voltage. The primary goal of this research is to discover, optimize, and demonstrate new circuit approaches which allow the implementation of such systems with levels of power dissipation and performance which more closely approach the fundamental limits imposed by the basic technology being used than current approaches. The general area of interest if RF transceivers for RF LANs ald personal communications devices, and transceivers for fiber-optic systems and wire-based systems. Specific topics for investigation are limits-to-phase noise performance in power-optimized monolithic voltage-controlled oscillators, investigation of new parallel- architecture sampling demodulators, limits-to-distortion performance in MOS sampling demodulators, the use of passive- sampling FIR switched capacitor filters for low-power, high- frequency filte ring and CDMA despreading, optimization of the sensitivity in fiber optic communication receivers, the application of BiCMOS technology for the particular needs of high-speed communications, and modeling of active and passive IC components for RF design.
