| Summary: | The monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) has the advantages of higher performances, in terms of frequency, power consumption, functional stability, compact physical size and hence greater integration. MMIC building blocks with excellent performances provide the possibility of realizing high speed sub-terahertz communication systems. In the first part of this research, a distributed amplifier and a distributed mixer with ultra-broad operation bandwidth are designed and analyzed. By deploying various loss compensation techniques, the proposed designs obtain an operation band up to over 100 GHz, with good amplifier gain and good conversion gain for the distributed mixer. In the second part of this research, three function blocks of frequency converters are proposed. By breaking through the limitation of the fabrication technology, the frequency quadrupler gains a 2.1 dBm output at 140 GHz; and the two frequency modulators successfully achieved modulated output signals at 170 and 340 GHz, respectively. To further explore the terahertz MMIC design, new generation of technology, GaN on silicon devices, are characterized in the last part of the research; where the results obtained shall promise a brighter future for the MMICs.
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