Recent Advances in Silicon-Based RFIC Design

Dear Colleagues,

From their first appearance on the market in the last decade of the 20th Century, RFICs have increased the operation frequency from a few to several hundred GHz. This impressive evolution made the RFIC pervasive in several high-tech application fields, where telecommunications and sensing are still key drivers today. Next transceivers for 5G or Internet-of-Things, radars for self-driving cars, millimetre-wave receivers for security, or distributed array radio-telescopes are just a few examples. In particular, during these first two decades of the 21st Century, microelectronics technology has demonstrated silicon to be a material of high interest to target RF applications of up to more than 100 GHz without giving up, as using III-V semiconductors has the benefit of a low size, low cost, and compatibility with the digital CMOS. In the last half-decade, silicon notably landed in the IMWP area (integrated microwave photonics), paving the way for the fabrication of a new class of silicon integrated circuits offering RF signal manipulation capabilities in the optical domain, out-of-the-way of pure electrical solutions. For the next decade, quantum computing will be another hot research area, where silicon-based RFICs appear as a promising candidate to control and read-out the qubit. Even if most of the actual quantum processors are transmonic, spintronic qubits are indeed very appealing for massive solid-state quantum supremacy processors, because of their smaller footprint and compatibility with the CMOS technology.

Aim of this Special Issue is to collect recent advances in the design of silicon-based RFIC’s and related systems covering, but not limited to, the following hot application fields:

• Digital intensive RF transceiver architectures
• High speed ADCs for direct sampling RF receiver architectures
• Millimeter-wave SiGe BiCMOS front-ends and frequency synthesis
• Cryogenic CMOS RFICs for quantum engineering
• Silicon microwave-photonics integrated circuits

Dr. Mattia Borgarino
Guest Editor

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• Millimeterwave SiGe BiCMOS integrated circuits
• High speed ADC
• 5G transceivers
• Silicon microwave photonics
• Quantum engineering RFICs
• Millimeterwave imaging RFICs
• Cryogenics CMOS RFICs
• Automotive radar RFICs