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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MICROWAVE THEORY AND TECHNIQUES, VOL. 63, NO. 3, MARCH 2015

A G-Band Standing-Wave PushPush VCO

Using a Transmission-Line Resonator
Hyunji Koo, Student Member, IEEE, Choul-Young Kim, Member, IEEE, and Songcheol Hong, Member, IEEE
AbstractIn this paper, we propose a standing-wave pushpush
voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) using a transmission-line (TL)
resonator that covers a frequency range of 151174 GHz. By
properly distributing negative
cells in the TL resonator, a wide
frequency tuning range with low phase noise can be obtained.
The electrical length of the TL resonator is determined to achieve
a high second-harmonic output power. The fabricated VCO
demonstrates a phase noise of 91.3 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset
at a pushpush output frequency of 151.1 GHz (the estimated
result) and a tuning range of 14% with a dc power consumption
of 33 mW at a 1-V supply voltage. The pushpush output power
ranges from 14.5 to 16 dBm. The gure-of-merit including the
tuning range
is 182.6 dBc/Hz.
Index TermsCMOS oscillator, E-band voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO), G-band VCO, pushpush oscillator, standing-wave
(SW) oscillator, transmission-line (TL) resonator, W-band VCO,
wide tuning-range VCO.

I. INTRODUCTION

HE millimeter-wave (mm-wave) frequency band above

100 GHz is attractive for its serviceable wide band, which
makes it possible to obtain a high data rate with simple modulation for communication systems, and high resolution for radar
systems. CMOS technology has become appropriate to generate
the signal source for these bands since it has been scaled down.
A 300-GHz fundamental oscillator designed by 65-nm CMOS
technology has been reported [1] and some signal generators
that are tunable above 100 GHz have been introduced at the fundamental frequency [2], [3]. However, it still remains difcult to
simultaneously obtain low phase noise and a wide tuning range
because the quality factor of a varactor is low at high frequency,
and the size of transistors for a negative
cell is limited by its
parasitic capacitance.
In previous works, a standing-wave (SW) oscillator that includes distributed negative
cells was introduced [4][6]. The
distributed
cells and varactors reduce the loading effects so
that the voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) can be operated at
high frequency. This structure consumes high dc power because
Manuscript received February 28, 2014; revised May 31, 2014, October 30,
2014, and December 21, 2014; accepted January 10, 2015. Date of publication
February 09, 2015; date of current version March 03, 2015. This Pioneer Research Center program work was supported by the Korea Government Ministry
of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) under the National Research
Foundation of Korea (NRF) under Grant 2012-0009594.
H. Koo and S. Hong with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon 305701, Korea (e-mail: pop017@kaist.ac.kr; schong@ee.kaist.ac.kr).
C.-Y. Kim is with the Department of Electronics Engineering, Chungnam
National University, Daejeon 305-746, Korea.
Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TMTT.2015.2398445

it includes several
cells, but it produces low phase noise at
mm-wave frequencies [5]. For this reason, the SW oscillator is
a good alternative in the mm-wave frequency range.
SW oscillators are classied as ,
,
oscillators, and
so on, according to resonator length and boundary condition
[4], [6], [7]. Usually, the resonators of these SW oscillators are
differentially constructed with the transmission line (TL). In the
case of the
SW oscillator, the resonator is in the shape of
the parallel connection of the differential TLs at the center of
a
cell. This structure has the advantage of being capable
of operation at high frequency because the resonator has half
inductance due to the parallel connection.
In [4], a VCO was designed with an all-distributed conguration, in which both the
cells and varactors were distributed
on the TL resonator. For a wide tuning range, the electrical
length of the resonator was changed by using large transistor
switches. However, this is not suitable for a pushpush oscillator because second-harmonic signals leak through the large
parasitic capacitors of the transistor switches, which leads to
pushpush output power reduction.
In this work, using the benets of a
SW oscillator,
we designed a G-band pushpush VCO. We obtained a wide
tuning range by only distributing the
cells, unlike the design
proposed in the previous work [4]. The enhancement of the
tuning range is explained using an LC model. The length of the
TL resonator is determined considering the pushpush output
power. We propose a pushpush architecture based on a
SW oscillator and present an analysis of the second-harmonic
output power of the circuit. The proposed VCO was fabricated
by CMOS 65-nm technology. It demonstrates a low phase noise
of 91.3 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset, which is the estimated result
from the measured phase noise at the fundamental frequency.
The
at the frequency of 151.1 GHz is 182.6 dBc/Hz
and the pushpush output power ranges from 14.5 to 16
dBm. The continuous tuning range of 151174 GHz or 14% is
obtained using only varactors as frequency tuning components.
This paper is organized as follows. In Section II, the proposed VCO is introduced and analyzed at the fundamental frequency. In Section III, we explain the resonator design considering the second-harmonic power and the pushpush output
matching network. In Section IV, the chip implementation and
measurement results are presented.
II. DESIGN AND ANALYSIS
A. VCO Configuration
Fig. 1(a) shows the simplied structure of the proposed VCO.
It consists of a resonator with differential TLs connected in par-

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KOO et al.: G-BAND SW PUSHPUSH VCO USING TL RESONATOR

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Fig. 2. (a) VCO structure with distributed

cells. (b) Equivalent LC circuit
of (a). (c) Equivalent LC circuit of conventional cross-coupled VCO.
Fig. 1. (a) Proposed pushpush SW VCO and (b) buffer.

where

allel and a negative

component for compensating the loss
of the TLs. Both ends of the resonator should be shorted at the
fundamental frequency for SW oscillation and become virtual
ground ends due to the differential structure of the designed oscillator. These two virtual ground ends can be used for supply
feeding and a pushpush output port, respectively, as shown in
Fig. 1(a). Previous works on pushpush oscillators [15][18]
have shown that a feeding line consumes a large area. However,
this structure eliminates the need for a choke inductor or a
line for supply feeding.
In this study, we used three distributed
cells, as shown in
Fig. 2(a). Unlike in [4], the three
cells were distributed in
the resonator, and the varactors were located only at the center
of resonator. This allows the small static capacitance of the resonator to have a wide tuning range. However, in this conguration, more dc power consumption can be expected due to the
smaller voltage swings of the side
cells. These are discussed
in detail in the following sections.
B. Frequency and Tuning Range of VCO
If the TL resonators are regarded as inductors, the oscillator
can be modeled as shown in Fig. 2(b). The outer capacitance
of
consists of only the parasitic capacitance of a
cell
, and the inner capacitance of
consists of the capacitance of a
cell and the capacitance of varactors
or
. Here,
is the inner inductance and
is
the outer inductance of the resonator. The oscillation angular
frequency can be obtained by nding the common resonance
impedance looking from each
cell [25]

(1)

(2)
The proposed VCO is compared with two different VCOs
with identical total size of
cells and varactors. One is an
all-distributed VCO that has a distributed arrangement of varactors and
cells at the same location. The other is a conventional cross-coupled VCO. In the former VCO, we obtained the
angular frequency
[25], as both capacitances of
and
in Fig. 2(b) are set to
,
(3)
where
(4)
In the latter VCO, the circuit was modeled as shown in Fig. 2(c),
and its angular frequency
was calculated as
(5)
and
were chosen for the same oscillation anHere,
gular frequency
. For simple comparison,
the
cells in the proposed VCO were assumed to be equally
distributed
. When
and
are, respectively, substituted by
and
in (1), (1) can be written as
(6)

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Fig. 3. Calculated tuning-range improvement ratio with respect to

.

and

where
(7)

Fig. 4. Simulated tuning range (TR) according to the positions of the side
cells.

where
with
and
By comparing
one can compare the tuning range for the small variation of
They are

,
.

(13)
(14)

(8)
where
(9)
(10)
(11)
From (10) and (11), in the case of
, we can conclude that the tuning ranges of the two compared VCOs are the
same. This was determined intuitively by observing the ratio of
the varactor capacitance variation to the static capacitance in (3)
and (5).
The ratio of (8)(10),
, indicates
the tuning-range improvement of the proposed structure in comparison with the conventional one. It is plotted with respect to
the values of
and
in Fig. 3, where the angular frequencies of
and
are both equal to
GHz.
This shows that the tuning range of the proposed structure is
always wider than that of the other structure and the degree
of tuning-range improvement is increased according to the decrease in the
. Therefore, the proposed structure effectively
increases the tuning range at high frequencies, where a large
is not appropriate due to its low quality factor. The used
mean values of
and
are 18.55 and 35.25 fF, respectively, so the ratio is 1.368. Considering the whole range of the
varactor capacitances (15.856.6 fF), the ratio obtained from the
following equations is about the same:
(12)

These results show that the tuning range of the proposed VCO
is around 1.37 times wider than that of the other compared
VCOs with identical total size of
cells and varactors.
Fig. 4 shows the simulated tuning range with respect to the
ratio of
to . To be more realistic, the quality factors of the
inductors were set at 30. The large value of
means that
the
cells were distributed with a large space between them.
This graph shows that the tuning range increased as the
increased.
In this design, we placed the
cells at the positions of
, which was a compromise between a wide tuning
range and a high second-harmonic power. The harmonic power
changed with the gate input voltage. In the SW oscillator, the
voltage amplitude was the highest at the center of the resonator,
and it decreased along the TL, as shown in Fig. 2(a). Thus, the
harmonic power decreases when the side
cells are located at
a position far from the center of the resonator. Therefore, a compromise is required between the tuning range and the pushpush
output power. We will discuss the second-harmonic power in
Section III.
In the real design, the resonator should be modeled with TLs
rather than pure inductors. Since the inherent capacitance of the
TL acts as the static capacitance, the tuning range decreases. The
electromagnetic (EM) simulation including the effects of the TL
resonator and connection lines shows that the tuning range drops
to 15.7%. To curtail the reduction, enough space between the
resonator and the ground should be introduced.
C. Phase Noise, Power Consumption, and

of VCO

The SW oscillator is known to have good phase noise and

large voltage amplitude because of incident, reection, and injection mechanisms throughout the TL resonator [4], [25]. To
verify these, we simulated the phase noise with respect to the
ratio of
, as in Fig. 5(a). The phase noise did not show signicant changes until
is about 1, and the minimum value
was obtained when
was 0.4. The drain voltage waveforms at the two positions under
are also presented

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Fig. 6. Simulated

Fig. 5. (a) Simulated phase noise according to the positions of the side
cell and the side
and simulated waveforms at the drain of the center
(
pH,
pH) and (c)
when (b)
(
pH,
pH).

cells,
cells

in Fig. 5(b) and (c). As

increased, the voltage swings
of the side
cells decreased. However, the amplitude of the
center
cell did not decrease.
When
, the tuning range greatly increased with the
ratio, which maintained a low phase noise. That shows the advantage of a
SW oscillator with distributed
cells. In the
conventional cross-coupled VCO, the large varactor provides a
wide tuning range, but poor phase noise due to the low quality
factor of the large varactor.
Fig. 6 shows that the
of the SW oscillator also improved as the
ratio increased.
is given as
mW
(15)
where
,
, and denote the phase noise at
offset,
tuning range, dc power consumption, and the oscillating frequency, respectively. The graph shows that the improvement
was not as great as the increase in the tuning range. This is because power consumption is also increased with the ratio. The
gate voltage swing of the side
cell became smaller as the location moved away from the center of the resonator, as shown in
Fig. 5(c), which led to an incomplete switching operation of the
transistors. This induced a higher average dc power consumption with an increasing ratio, as shown in Fig. 6.
D. Component Analysis
Transistor: It is very important to determine the unit transistor size at such a high frequency. We considered two
cases to estimate the . One was the combined three transistors and the other was one transistor with the same total
gate width. Fig. 7(a) shows the
values of both cases
with respect to the frequency. The values were obtained
by the following equation [26]:
(16)

and current consumption.

The -parameters in the equation were extracted by

simulation. The differences in
between the one large
transistor and the three combined transistors came from
the parasitic components in each single transistor. As the
number of ngers of the transistor increased, the parasitic
resistance of the interconnection lines and the associated
capacitances also increased, and that reduced the
value. The difference increased at a higher frequency.
The VCO with three combined transistors (2- m-unit
nger width and six ngers) had better performance in
terms of output power and phase noise than the single
large transistor (2- m-unit nger width and 18 ngers). A
comparison of their performance in Fig. 7(b) and (c) revealed that the phase noise was reduced by 1.5 dB at
1-MHz offset and the pushpush output power increased
by 2 dB.
Varactor: The key difculty in obtaining a wide tuning
range is the low quality factor of varactors. The total capacitance and the quality factor of the varactors are presented with respect to the applied voltage in Fig. 8. We
used accumulation-mode MOS varactors with a gate length
of 200 nm and a width of 28.8 m. The quality factor was
varied from 6 to 20.
Fig. 9(a) shows the equivalent parallel resistance
of
the LC tank and the negative conductance
of the
cross-coupled pair in relation to process, temperature, and
supply (PVT) variations. The LC tank includes the TL and
the varactors in the state of the lowest quality factor. To
verify that the startup condition
is satised,
is calculated, and the results are shown in
Fig. 9(b); the simulated startup condition is satised until
100 GHz at the worst condition of the fastfast (ff) process
corner, 85 C temperature, and 0.9-V supply voltage.
E. Buffer Design
The buffer for the fundamental frequency was designed for a
phase-locked loop (PLL) feedback loop and the local oscillator
(LO) signal of the sub-harmonic mixer at a receiver. It had the
structure of a differential common source amplier, as shown in
Fig. 1(b). Each of the differential output ports was matched to
50 in the wide frequency range of the VCP. The transistors of

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III. SECOND-HARMONIC POWER CONSIDERATION

As explained in Section II, the proposed structure has low
phase noise and a wide tuning range at high frequency. However, in the view of second-harmonic power, this structure can
have a shortcoming in producing high harmonic power because
it has an additional unwanted signal path to the ac ground (
port), as well as the path to the output. Moreover, the two-sided
cells produce little harmonic power due to the small voltage
swing. In this section, we explain the resonator with regard to
the second-harmonic signal and matching to 50 to obtain high
harmonic output power.
A. Design of TL Resonator

Fig. 7. (a)
values of combined three transistors and one transistor with the
same total gate width with respect to the frequency. (b) VCO using combined
three transistors. (c) VCO using one transistor.

Fig. 8. Capacitance and

-factor of the varactor according the applied voltage.

Fig. 9. (a) Simulated equivalent parallel resistance

of LC tank when
of the crossfactor of the varactor is the lowest and negative conductance
coupled pair for PVT variation. (b) Their products to verify the startup condition
is satised.

M1 were connected to a position of the resonator away from its

center that reduced the capacitance loading on the resonator.

The TL resonator was designed in the shape of the coplanar

strip line at the fundamental frequency, whereas, at the secondharmonic frequency, the coplanar waveguide was constructed
with a coplanar ground plane. In a previous study [7], a tapered TL structure was proposed to provide a high -factor,
but transitions of the space and the TL width caused impedance
variation at the second-harmonic frequency. Therefore, the TL
should have uniform width and space along the line to optimize
the output power of the second-harmonic.
Among the physical dimensions of the TL, the electrical
length has the most inuence on the pushpush output power.
To understand the TL length effect, we designed a simple
oscillator circuit, as shown in Fig. 10(a). The TL width
was set to be 10 m for low loss, and the distance between
the resonator and the ground plane
was determined to be
20 m to ensure enough space so that the ground plane would
have less effect on the VCO performance at the fundamental
frequency. These dimensions were set to be the same as in this
design.
To determine the effect of the TL electrical length at the
second-harmonic frequency (D) on the pushpush output
power, we simulated the output power with respect to the
length, as shown in Fig. 10(b). We designed TL resonators with
various lengths using EM simulation, and we also designed
a conjugated impedance matching network for the
of
50
for each TL length. The lumped component,
, was
adjusted with the TL length to maintain an oscillation frequency
of 80 GHz. These processes were carried out for three different
transistor sizes.
Fig. 10(b) shows that the output power increased as the TL
length approached 90 because the loss due to the path to the
port could be minimized by using the impedance transformation with a 90 TL. This is obviously observed when the
gate width of transistor M3 is 12 m. In this design, we chose
a 36- m gate width to achieve high output power, which, however, induces a large parasitic capacitance. This did not allow us
to use the TL length of 90 . In addition, a varactor must be introduced for frequency tuning. We found that the TL length should
be smaller than 60 . As shown in Fig. 10(b), the power barely
changed after 45 . Therefore, we selected 45 and selected the
capacitance of the varactors as
to minimize the loss owing
into the
port.
There is another possible approach to minimizing the loss by
using different electrical lengths of TL. If the length to the

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Fig. 11. Imaginary impedance of

.
with respect to the separation

and quality factor ( ) of a resonator

Fig. 10. (a) Simplied oscillator circuit to design a resonator. (b) Simulated
output powers with respect to the TL electrical length at the second-harmonic
(D), and size of transistor M3.

port is 90 , most of the second-harmonic power goes to the desired output port. However, it also creates a disadvantage because the length of the other side of the TL would shorten to
have the same operating frequency. This would lead to a steep
decline in the voltage amplitude along the TL, the short part
of the resonator. This means the voltage swings at the gates of
the distributed
cells would become small, which would degrade the pushpush output power. Simulation shows that the
pushpush power of this approach is lower than that of the proposed VCO by 0.61 dB.
The space
between the coplanar strip lines also affects
the output power. As shown in Fig. 11, a large space gives a
high -factor, which increases the voltage swing. However, because it also reduces the size of the resonator due to the larger
imaginary value, there is an optimum value for obtaining a high
output power. After optimization, the space was set to 20 m.
B. Output Matching
To achieve the maximum power at the pushpush output
port, the port should be matched to 50 . Since the output
port is independent of the
supply in this design, we
only needed to include a dc blocking capacitor to isolate the
load from the supply. After distribution, the impedance at the
pushpush output,
, moved to
, as shown in
Fig. 12. The conjugate matching network is also presented in
the gure, including the dc block capacitor
. The shunt
capacitor
was made with the pad. Fig. 13 shows the
measured return loss compared to the simulated return loss.

Fig. 12. Simulated output impedance

and matching network.

Fig. 13. Simulated and measured S-parameter,

port.

with respect to the TL length

, at the pushpush output

IV. MEASUREMENT RESULTS

The proposed VCO was fabricated by a CMOS 65-nm
process, and a photograph of the chip is shown in Fig. 14.
The total chip size, including pads, is 510 m
680 m
( 0.3468 mm ), and the core size is 330 m
140 m
(0.0462 mm ). All biases were applied through bond wires,
and high-frequency measurement was performed with

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Fig. 16. Spectrum of pushpush output

bandwidth (RBW) of 3 MHz.

V at resolution

Fig. 14. Chip photograph.

Fig. 17. Measured power and frequency of the pushpush output signal.

Fig. 15. G-band measurement set-up for: (a) spectrum and (b) output power.

groundsignalground (GSG) probes. The VCO and the buffer

used a supply voltage of 1 V and consumed 33 and 3 mW of
power, respectively.
The measurement setup for the spectrum and the output
power at the pushpush output port is shown in Fig. 15. The
spectrum was observed using a G-band harmonic mixer and
diplexer, working with an Agilent E4407B spectrum analyzer.
Output power measurement was carried out by using the
Erickson power meter, PM4. The spectrum is presented in
Fig. 16, and the pushpush output power and the frequency
change with the control voltage are plotted in Fig. 17. The
output power was in a range from 14.5 to 16 dBm, and the
frequency was tuned from 151 to 175 GHz. The tuning range
was about 14%. The power level of fundamental signal at the
pushpush output was simulated to be about 25.5 dBm. The
W-band measurement set-up is similar to that of G-band.
Fig. 18(a) and (b) shows, respectively, the spectrum from the
buffer at the fundamental frequency with the control voltages
of 0 and 2 V. Fig. 19 shows the output power at the buffer,

Fig. 18. Spectrum of buffer output at RBW of 3 MHz when: (a)

V and (b)
V.

after the path losses of a probe tip and waveguides were

de-embedded. The measured result was a little higher than the
simulation result due to the overestimated loss of top metal.
The maximum power was 0.5 dBm. The measured return loss
at the buffer output is presented with the simulation result in
Fig. 20. The measured result was obtained when the oscillator
was turned off, whereas the simulation was conducted when it
was turned on. If the oscillator is turned on, the return loss is
slightly changed due to the increased input capacitance.
Phase-noise measurement was carried out with the buffer
output at the fundamental oscillation frequency. The phase
noise of the pushpush signal was estimated only by the
theory that the phase noise of the second-harmonic signal is
degraded by 6 dB. It was measured using an Agilent PXA

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Fig. 22. Phase-noise measurement result at the fundamental frequency when:

V and
V.
(a)

Fig. 19. Measured buffer output power.

Fig. 23. Measured phase noise and FOM,

range.

Fig. 20. Simulated and measured S-parameter,

, at buffer output port.

for the whole control voltage

The conversion loss of the down converter was 39 dB. The

phase-noise measurement was carried out at the IF frequency
around 800 MHz, and the results are shown in Fig. 22. Also, we
plotted the phase noise at 1-MHz offset in relation to the control
voltage in Fig. 23. The phase noise of the second-harmonic was
estimated from that of the fundamental signal by the addition
of 6 dB. The average phase noise at the second-harmonic
was 88.2 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset, and the minimum phase
noise was 91.3 dBc/Hz at the output frequency of 151 GHz.
Two gures-of-merit (FOMs), FOM and
, are also
plotted in Fig. 23, and their average values were 177.6 and
180.5 dBc/Hz, respectively. The FOM is given as
mW

Fig. 21. W-band phase noise measurement setup.

N9030A spectrum analyzer, as shown in Fig. 21. We made a

down-converted signal by mixing the output signal with the
external signal from an Anritsu MG3694A signal generator
with a phase noise of 126 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset in 5.5 GHz.

(17)

A comparison with the results obtained in previous studies at

the E-, W-, and G-band and over is presented in Tables I and
II, respectively. Table I shows that the phase noise in this work
is lowest among the E- and W-band VCOs, comparing with the
translated phase noise at 1-MHz offset. Although the power consumption is high, the
is comparatively low in this band.
In the case of the G-band, shown in Table II, the proposed VCO
showed good performance in terms of the tuning range and the
phase noise. Most importantly, the proposed VCO showed the
highest
performance.
V. CONCLUSION
We have designed a G-band pushpush VCO with a wide
tuning range, low phase noise, and enhanced pushpush output
power. The static capacitance of the resonator was reduced by

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TABLE I
COMPARISON OF REPORTED CMOS-BASED E- AND W-BAND VCOs

(1) Minimum value.

TABLE II
COMPARISON OF REPORTED CMOS VCOS ABOVE 140 GHz

(1) Including buffer for fundamental oscillation signal (the separated port).
(2) Estimated from the phase noise measured at fundamental frequency.
(3) A radiator at second harmonic frequency. (4) EIRP. (5) Estimated core area. (6) Area including pads.

distribution of the
cells, which resulted in a wide tuning
range with low phase noise. However,
was not improved
much as the tuning range increased. This was because the average dc current increased due to the reduced voltage swings of
the side
cells. However, it is still a useful architecture at such
a high frequency, where it is very difcult to simultaneously obtain a wide tuning range and low phase noise.
The TL resonator was designed to minimize the loss to the
port. Most of all, the electrical length at the second-harmonic frequency had the strongest inuence on the output
power. As it approached 90 , the output power increased. This
is because the loss to the
port was reduced. Since a supply
feeding line is not needed at the output of the proposed design,
the output matching network becomes very simple. This VCO
achieves a continuous tuning range as wide as 24 GHz. To the
best of our knowledge, the
of 182.6 dBc/Hz is the
highest performance of state-of-the-art VCOs above 140 GHz.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the IC Design Education
Center (IDEC) for their support with the computer-aided design
(CAD) tools. The authors would also like to thank the measurement support from J.-S. Rieh and N. Kim, Korea University, and
acknowledge the support of J. Kang, KRISS.
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Hyunji Koo (S'08) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Korea Advanced Institute
of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon,
Korea, in 2008, and is currently working toward the
Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering at KAIST.
Her research interests include voltage-controlled
oscillators (VCOs) at millimeter-wave frequencies
and transmitter for chip-to-chip communication
systems.

1045

Choul-Young Kim (S'04A12M13) received the

B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Chungnam
National University (CNU), Daejeon, Korea, in
2002, and the M.S. and Ph.D degrees in electrical
engineering from the Korea Advanced Institute of
Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Korea,
in 2004 and 2008, respectively.
From March 2009 to February 2011, he was a
Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Department
of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University
of California at San Diego (UCSD). He is currently
an Assistant Professor of electronics engineering with Chungnam National
University, Daejeon, Korea. His research interests include millimeter-wave
integrated circuits and systems for short-range radar and phased-array antenna
applications.

Songcheol Hong (S'87M'88) received the B.S. and

M.S. degrees in electronics from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1982 and 1984, respectively,
and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from
the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor,
MI, USA, in 1989.
In May 1989, he joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon,
Korea. In 1997, he held short visiting professorships
with Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA, and
with Samsung Microwave Semiconductor, Suwon, Korea. His research interests
are microwave integrated circuits and systems including power ampliers for
mobile communications, miniaturized radar, millimeter-wave frequency synthesizers, and novel semiconductor devices.