Voltage-Controlled Oscillator Utilizing Inverse-Mode SiGe-HBT Biasing Circuit for the Mitigation of Single-Event Effects

The advantages and the tradeoffs associated with the use of inverse-mode (IM) silicon-germanium (SiGe) heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs) biasing circuitry in radio-frequency (RF) voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs) have been investigated and the performance of proposed VCOs (IM VCOs) is compared with VCOs with conventional forward-mode (FM) SiGe-HBTs (FM VCOs). Where the high-frequency performance of IM VCOs is inevitably degraded due to unfavorable device optimization unlike FM VCOs, IM VCOs provide acceptable low-GHz VCO circuit performance. In terms of single-event effects (SEEs), the IM VCOs show reduced transient peaks and duration in comparison with conventional FM VCOs. In addition, the performance of the VCOs is analyzed in terms of transient error vector magnitude (TEVM) in an RF receiver (RX) using quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) modulation under a radiation environment. The IM VCOs in the RX circuit show better reliability under SEEs, offering 28.2% lower TEVM at a 64 Mb/s data rate, than that of the RX circuit with conventional FM VCOs. Therefore, the application of IM SiGe-HBT biasing circuits for RF VCOs can be a viable SEE-hardening technique for space-based RF systems. The VCO prototype was fabricated using IHP 130-nm SiGe bipolar complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (BiCMOS) technology.