A $D$ -Band CMOS Transmitter With IF-Envelope Feed-Forward Pre-Distortion and Injection-Locked Frequency-Tripling Synthesizer

A D-band CMOS transmitter is presented with an integrated injection-locked frequency-tripling synthesizer, digital control, and an on-chip antenna. It employs an IF feed-forward pre-distortion scheme, which improves gain compression of the transmitter to provide an overall higher linearity gain profile, allowing reduced power back-off for higher peak-to-average modulation schemes. The integrated D-band transmitter consumes 347 mW and occupies 1800× 1500 μm of silicon area. The proposed transmitter delivers 0.4 dBm of effective isotropic radiated power with a saturated power on-chip of at least 12.2 dBm. The transmitter has a peak power-added efficiency (PAE) of 4.8% with power delivered to the antenna and a peak PAE of 0.31% when considering radiated power.