Chip-Scale RF Correlator with Monolithically Integrated Time-Varying Transmission Line (TVTL)

Performing correlation directly at the first stage of RF front-end provides secure communication and immunity to jamming through coding/decoding, which may increase the dynamic range of the receiver by providing additional isolation from the leakage of the transmitter. In this paper, two tunable, chip-scale time-domain RF correlators based on the monolithically integrated time-varying transmission line (TVTL) are designed. Both frequency domain and time-domain correlation are tested. The results demonstrated the low loss, broadband and high power handling performance of the proposed chip-scale RF correlator.