A High Modulation Bandwidth, 110 GHz Power-DAC Cell for IQ Transmitter Arrays With Direct Amplitude and Phase Modulation

This paper studies the maximum Baud rate and the scalability to the W-Band of the mm-wave power-DAC transmitter architecture. Proof-of-concept implementations of a single DAC lane and of a 2×2 IQ transmitter array are reported in 45 nm SOI CMOS. The DAC cell achieved 29 GHz OOK and 29 GHz BPSK modulation bandwidth and 2×44 Gb/s BPSK+OOK data rates for carriers in the 100-110 GHz range. The corresponding energy efficiency is 7.5 pJ/bit at an output power of 12 dBm. For the 2×2 IQ array, an EVM of 9.0% is estimated over a 12 GHz bandwidth, from large signal power and S-parameter phase measurements.