Design of Broadband Highly Linear IQ Modulator Using a 0.5 m E/D-PHEMT Process for Millimeter-Wave Applications

A broadband highly linear IQ modulator using a 0.5-mum enhancement/depletion-pseudomorphic high-electron mobility transistor process is presented in this letter. An innovative broadside/edge coupler is proposed to apply to the IQ modulator. The chip size is only 1times1 mm², including radio frequency and baseband PADs. The sideband and local oscillation suppressions of the modulator are better than -33 and -15 dBc, respectively. At a carrier frequency of 60 GHz with a 64 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) modulation, the modulator demonstrates an error vector magnitude of within 3%, and an adjacent channel power ratio of better than -40 dBc. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this work demonstrates the best modulation quality with a 64 QAM modulation up to 60 GHz among all the reported reflection-type IQ modulators.