RMO2D-3
Adaptive Integrated CMOS Circulator
Seyyed Amir Ayati, Debashis Mandal, Bertan Bakkaloglu, Sayfe Kiaei
Arizona State University, USA
Abstract — An adaptive circulator fabricated on a 130 nm
CMOS is presented. Circulator has two adaptive blocks for
gain and phase mismatch correction and leakage cancelation.
The impedance matching circuit corrects mismatches for
antenna, divider, and LNTA. The cancelation block cancels
the Tx leakage. Measured isolation between transmitter and
receiver for single tone at 2.4 GHz is 90 dB, and for a 40
MHz wide-band signal is 50dB. The circulator Rx gain is 10
dB, with NF = 4.7 dB and 5 dB insertion loss.
Index Terms — Echo cancelation, Full-Duplex Transceiver,
Leakage cancelation, On-chip circulator.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Three-port RF circulators allow simultaneous
transmission and reception of the signal sharing the
same antenna. The ideal circulator has high isolation
between the transmit and receive ports, high linearity,
low noise figure, and |S13| = |S32| = |S21| = 1 (other
parameters are zero). Integrated circulators offer smaller
size, minimal external components, lower power, and
integration with the RF and base-band modules. The
required transmit to receiver port isolation is above
50-60 dB to minimize the front-end receiver saturation.
Circuit non-idealities such as gain and phase mismatches,
non-linearity, noise, and parasitics limit the circulator
performance. Circulator noise figure, and the transmitter
noise floor can further limit the receiver sensitivity and
SNR [1], [2].
The divider-combiner method proposed by [3] uses a
divider at the output of the PA. At the forward path, the
divider connects the PA output to the antenna and to a
differential LNA input port without any phase shift. The
divider creates a phase shift in the reverse path to create a
differential receiver signal to the LNA. This approach was
used by [4] for hybrid duplexer and a feedback loop is
employed to measure the transmitter leakage and correct
the impedance of the balance network. The drawback is the
large noise figure in the duplexer. Since, it cannot cancel
the PA noise.
In this paper, we present an active on-chip CMOS
circulator using the divider combiner method with adaptive
two stage compensation blocks. At the input side, the
adaptive impedance matching block is used to compensate
for the circuit mismatches which are the phase, amplitude,
and impedance of the divider, antenna, and the Low Noise
Trans-conductance Amplifier (LNTA) circuit. At the output
of the circulator, an adaptive trans-conductance stage is
978-1-4673-8651-7/16/$31.00 © 2016 IEEE
used to further cancel any remnant leakage at the LNTA
output to minimize the transmit leak to the receiver.
II. S YSTEM A RCHITECTURE
Fig. 1 shows the block diagram of the Adaptive active
circulator integrated in 130 nm RF CMOS process.
The circulator consists of a divider that passes the
transmit signal s(t) to the antenna and to the low noise
trans-conductance amplifier (LNTA) as a common mode
signal Vcm = s+ (t) − s− (t). The received signal from
the antenna r(t) is fed to one of the LNTA differential
input port r+ (t). The received signal also passes through
the divider in the reverse direction resulting in 180 degree
phase shift signal r− (t). The LNTA differential input
signals is Vdif f = r+ (t) − r− (t).
Fig. 1. Proposed Circulator.
At the LNTA input signal path, the variable
impedance block balances the impedance mismatch, and
phase/amplitude unbalance of the two LNTA input paths.
These mismatches will impact the transmit signal s(t)
going into the LNTA input as a common mode signal,
as well as the differential received signal r+ (t) and
r− (t). At the LNTA output, the leakage cancelation block
cancels any remnant leakage of the transmitted signal
s(t) at the output of the LNTA by using an adaptive
trans-conductance stage.
III. C IRCULATOR C IRCUIT I MPLEMENTATION
Fig. 2 shows the on-chip CMOS circulator circuit
integrated in RF CMOS 130 nm IBM process. The LNTA
is a common source low-noise amp with the differential
−
output signals, i+
o and io . At the LNTA input, the variable
impedance circuit compensates for the circuit impedance
mismatches. At the LNTA output, the cancelation circuit
generates the cancelation currents i+ c and i− c with
146 2016 IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium
Fig. 2. LNTA, Leakage cancelation gm , and output buffer circuit.

appropriate phase and amplitude variations to reduce the

residual of the transmitted common mode signal at its
Fig. 3. Active variable impedance (a) circuit (b) input return loss
output. The output buffer is a differential common-gate
circuit, to improve the linearity and impedance matching
[5].
The variable impedance circuit shown in Fig. 3(a) is
used to match the signal inputs at the LNTA input. The
input impedance of this circuit is:

gm Lg ω 1
Zin = Ls + j( 2
− )
Cgs 1 − Lg C1 ω Cgs ω
Where gm and Cgs , are the transistor N1 parameters with
inductors Ls and Lg , and C1 is the variable gate capacitor
of a varactor diode. The real part of the impedance can
be changed by gm which is controlled by the Vctrl , and
the imaginary part of the impedance is controlled by
the variable cap C1 . The equivalent noise temperature of
variable load structure shown in Fig. 3, can reduce the
receiver noise figure [6].
The circuit non-idealties impacting the circulator and
the receiver performance are: a) LNTA differential and
common mode path circuit mismatches, b) LNTA CMRR,
linearity, and mismatch, and c) LNTA output leakage
cancelation resolution.
A. LNTA Input - Variable Impedance Block
The circulator performance is measured by the Transmit
Leakage Cancelation Ratio (TLCR). TLCR is the ratio
of the transmit leakage power at the output of the LNTA
vs. the PA transmit signal s(t) power Ps . Fig. 4 shows
the transmit TLCR vs. the input signal path phase and
amplitude mismatches caused by the divider, antenna, and
the LNTA input impedance.
(1)
Fig. 4. TLCR vs. the input signal path mismatches
These divider errors will cause mismatch between the
two paths in the forward direction impacting LNTA
common mode signal Vcm = s+ (t)−s− (t), and the reverse
path signal errors impacting Vdif f = r+ (t) − r− (t). As it
is shown in Fig. 4, amplitude error of 4%, or 2 degrees of
phase error between the two paths can reduce the TLCR
by 30dB. Measurement results show that the variable
impedance block at the LNTA input can improve the TLCR
up to 30-40dB which is a significant improvement.
B. LNTA Output - Leakage Cancelation Block
The output leakage cancelation circuit is a
trans-conductance stage with adaptive phase and
amplitude adjustment. It generates the correction current
ic which is injected to the LNTA output to reduce
the residual transmit leakage. During the initial circuit

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Fig. 5. TLCR at the LNTA output versus cancelation Ac , φc

calibration, the TLCR is measured in the baseband to

adjust the cancelation circuit parameters Ac , and φc . Fig.
5 shows the TLCR sensitivity vs. cancelation block phase
and amplitude changes. Measurement results in the next
section shows that this block can further improve TLCR
by an additional 30-40 dB.
IV. MEASUREMENT
The IC is fabricated in IBM 8RF 130nm CMOS process
and consists of LNTA, input variable impedance, output
leakage cancelation, and output buffer shown in Fig. 6.
The performance of the circulator in terms of linearity,
gain, noise figure, and the isolation between the ports is
measured.
A. Circulator RF circuit performance
The circulator receiver gain from antenna (port 1) to
the receiver (port 2) S12 is more than 10 dB. The PA
(port 3) to antenna gain S31 is -5 dB as shown in
Fig. 7 (a). In Fig. 7 (b), the overall circulator noise
Fig. 6. die micrograph (circulator area is 1mm2 ) and board
photograph
with and without the leakage cancelation block is shown.
The leakage cancelation block impact on the receiver
noise figure is less than 0.25 dB. Fig. 7 (c) shows the
linearity for the circulator by measuring the third order
IM3 at the receiver. The first plot is the PA signal
(common-mode) inter-modulation at the receiver IM 332 .
This shows that the leakage cancelation is limited by the
variable impedance block non-linearity. The second plot is
the Antenna to the receiver inter-modulation IM 312 which
is limited by the LNTA non-linearity.

Fig. 7. Circulator RF circuit performance (a) gain, losses, return losses (b) noise figure and leakage cancelation impact on NF (c)
circulator Intermodulation

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B. Adaptive Cancelation Blocks Measurements
Fig. 8 shows the two cancelation blocks measured
performance for a single tone at 2.4GHz. The first plot
is the TLCR without tuning the variable impedance block
and turning off the leakage cancelation block, and in this
case, the TLCR is 20dB. The second plot is the TLCR
with variable impedance block tunned which improved the
TLCR to 37 dB. Third plot is the TLCR with the variable
impedance block tunned and the leakage cancelation block
turned on resulting in a 90dB of TLCR.

Fig. 8. TLCR with and without variable impedance tuning and

leakage cancelation
A QPSK modulated signal with 20 MHz and 40 MHz
bandwidth and 0 dBm power were used as transmitted
signal in circulator and the receiver output was measured
by spectrum analyzer. The receiver output PSD was
measured with and without the leakage cancelation. Fig. 9
shows the transmitted signal PSD (black), transmit leakage
PSD without the leakage cancelation (dark-gray), and
transmit leakage PSD with the leakage cancelation (light
gray) for both 20 MHz signal (Fig. 9(a)) and 40 MHz
signal (Fig. 9(b)). The measured results shows a 50 dB
improvement in the TLCR by using the adaptive blocks.
V. CONCLUSION
An adaptive integrated CMOS circulator fabricated on
a 130 nm CMOS process has been implemented with a
TLCR higher than 90 dB for a single tone and over 50
dB for a 40 MHz band signal at 2.4 GHz. Two adaptive
blocks have been used to compensate for the circulator
mismatches and transmit leakage. The measured input
noise figure for the receive path is 4.7 dB.
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Fig. 9. QPSK modulated transmitted signal PSD with 0 dBm
power, and transmit leakage PSD with and without the leakage
cancelation (a) 20 MHz bandwidth (b) 40 MHz bandwidth.
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