A digital 72 Mb/s 64-QAM OFDM transceiver for 5 GHz wireless LAN in 0.18 /spl mu/m CMOS

OFDM forms the physical layer for upcoming broadband wireless LAN standards like IEEE 802.11a and ETSI Hiperlan/2. A throughput of 72Mb/s after coding within a 20MHz bandwidth requires spectrally-efficient modulation schemes up to 64-QAM. This requires transceiver implementations that extend the capabilities of classic OFDM signal processing to fast-burst communication in a multipath indoor environment. The presented ASIC includes a parameterizable interpolating equalizer architecture, clock offset tracking, and a robust programmable acquisition, covering all transmission modes from BPSK to 64-QAM.