Herschel Ainspan, Jean-Olivier Plouchart
ESSCIRC 2000
This article presents a compact 24-30-GHz phased array transceiver (TRX) front end (FE) with high transmitter (TX) power efficiency and low receiver (RX) noise figure (NF) in a 130-nm bipolar CMOS (BiCMOS) technology supporting different 5th generation mobile network (5G) frequency range 2 (FR2) bands (n257, n258, and n261). We introduce an embedded antenna TX/RX (T/R) switch (SW) topology to co-optimize the performances of the power amplifier (PA) and the low-noise amplifier (LNA) while minimizing insertion loss and die area. The proposed TRX integrated circuits (ICs) also integrates a transmission line-based passive phase shifter and 1-bit phase inverter for phase control and a phase-invariant variable gain amplifier (VGA) for gain control, enabling orthogonal phase and gain control in the FE. On-wafer measurements of the TRX FE IC at 25 °C demonstrate TX mode peak power efficiency of 22%-24% and RX-mode NF of 2.8-3.1 dB, including the impact of the antenna T/R switch. The measured OP1dB and PSAT in the TX mode are 15.6-16.2 and 17.8-18.8 dBm, respectively. RF phase shifting measurements demonstrate < 5.6° phase resolution with gain variation lower than ±0.5 dB without the need for calibration. We implement phase-invariant gain tunability for orthogonal tapering and beam steering control; the measured phase variation is <± 1.5° for 8-dB gain tuning over 24-30 GHz. The IC was measured at a temperature up to 105 °C and maintains TX peak power efficiency > 19% with PSAT degradation < 1 dB and RX NF < 5.1 dB. The IC has an active area of 2.1 × 0.6 mm.
Herschel Ainspan, Jean-Olivier Plouchart
ESSCIRC 2000
Jean-Olivier Plouchart, Noah Zamdmer, et al.
IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices
Mehmet Soyuer, Herschel A. Ainspan, et al.
Proceedings of the IEEE
Daeik D. Kim, Ongyeun Cho, et al.
CSICS 2008