An Integrated MEMS-BiCMOS SINCGARS Transceiver

This paper reports on the design of an integrated transceiver that supports SINCGARS (Single Channel Ground-Airborne Radio System). Utilizing both transistors and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), the circuit transmits preprocessed discrete-time baseband data and receives RF passband signals that are mixed to 100kHz and sampled by a fast ADC for off-chip demodulation. By using micromechanical (μmechanical) resonators and filters a lowIF (or digital-IF) communication system architecture is realized. This design marks the advent of Very Large Scale Mechanical Integration (VLSMI) by merging 46,413 transistors in a 0.6μm BiCMOS process with 9,286 μmechanical devices using an embedded micromachining technique [1].