Carrier Recovery Schemes for Submillimeter Wave Wireless Transmission

By moving carrier frequencies to higher and higher frequency bands, larger bandwidths can be provided for data-hungry wireless applications. The submillimeter wave region is a promising candidate for future systems. In order to accommodate sophisticated modulation formats, coherent local oscillators in the transmitter (TX) and the receiver (RX) are needed for efficient operation. However, traditional methods of analog carrier recovery (e.g., narrowband filtering of the residual carrier and reamplification) fail at such high frequencies and for many modulation formats. Also, digital carrier recovery algorithms used in conjunction with free-running oscillators are too power hungry and hard to realize for high data rates above 10 Gb/s. In this paper, carrier recovery schemes based on the parallel transmission of a reference frequency together with the payload data suitable for high data rates in the submillimeter waveband are proposed. They are demonstrated at 300-GHz carrier frequency. The corresponding electronic circuits for the TX and the RX are designed, manufactured, and characterized.