Planar 200-GHz Transceiver Modules

We report planar 200-GHz transmitter and receiver modules for high-frequency, high-capacity wireless transmission. The modules were used for 8-Gbaud 16QAM data transmission (32 Gb/s) over 7.1 m, featuring 13.4% rms EVM on a link with 10.4-dB added attenuation. The modules are compact and highly integrated, with only a passive antenna substrate and a single transmitter or receiver integrated circuit (IC) providing the transmitter and receiver radio frequency (RF) front-end functions, avoiding the size and cost of machined waveguide interfaces. The transmitter module contains a single indium phosphide (InP) IC, with (I, Q) baseband inputs, frequency up-conversion, and a power amplifier (PA), and it is wire-bonded using a wedge-bonder to a passive fused-silica (FS) antenna substrate that carries a 2× 2 patch antenna array and an impedance-matching network that matches the transmitter IC to the combined impedances of the antenna array and the IC-antenna wire-bond. The antenna radiation pattern has a beamwidth designed to couple efficiently to external polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) lenses having a 0.56 numerical aperture. The receiver module is similar. The transmitter module has a measured ±25° beamwidth in the E-plane and H-plane, a measured peak equivalent isotropic radiated power (EIRP) of 24 dBm, with the EIRP remaining greater than 19 dBm over 200-218 GHz. The receiver module has 29.4-dB peak conversion gain with 3-dB bandwidth of 14 GHz (from 194 to 208 GHz).