IMAGE LICENSED BY GRAPHIC STOCK Beyond the Smith Chart Eli Bloch and Eran Socher he topic of impedance transformation and Since CMOS technology was primarily and ini- matching is one of the well-established tially developed for digital purposes, the lack of and essential aspects of microwave engi- high-quality passive components made it practically neering. A few decades ago, when discrete useless for RF design. The device speed was also radio-frequency (RF) design was domi- far inferior to established III-V technologies such as Tnant, impedance matching was mainly performed us- GaAs heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs) and ing transmission-lines techniques that were practical high-electron mobility transistors (HEMTs). The first due to the relatively large design size. As microwave RF CMOS receiver was constructed at 1989 [1], but design became possible using integrated on-chip com- it would take another several years for a fully inte- ponents, area constraints made LC- section match- grated CMOS RF receiver to be presented. The scal- ing (using lumped passive elements) more practical ing trend of CMOS in the past two decades improved than transmission line matching. Both techniques are the transistors’ speed exponentially, which provided conveniently visualized and accomplished using the more gain at RF frequencies and also enabled opera- well-known graphical tool, the Smith chart. tion at millimeter-wave (mm-wave) frequencies. The Eli Bloch (
[email protected]) is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Technion— Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel. Eran Socher (
[email protected]) is with the School of Electrical Engineering, Tel-Aviv University, 69978, Israel.