An 18–32-GHz Reconfigurable Multi-Beam Phased-Array Transceiver in 65-nm CMOS for Wideband Wireless Communications

This paper presents an $18-32-\mathrm{GHz}$ eight-element phased array transceiver (TRX) with four simultaneously reconfigurable beams. It employs a triple-coupled transformer (TCT) embedded T/R switch topology with $2^{\text {nd }}$ harmonic trapping technique to boost power and noise performances of the T/R front ends. A millimeter-wave field-programmable beamforming network (BFN) is proposed to support the bidirectional multi-beam aggregation and regulation. The chip was fabricated in $65-\mathrm{nm}$ CMOS and occupies a $22.88-\mathrm{mm}^{2}$ area. It achieves 56% fractional bandwidth, <5.7-dB receive noise figure (NF) at $18-32 \mathrm{GHz}$, and $18.3 / 18.8-\mathrm{dBm}$ transmit peak 1-dB gain compression point $\left(P_{1 \mathrm{~dB}}\right)$/saturated output power $\left(P_{\text {sat }}\right)$. It demonstrates a state-of-the-art number of reconfigurable beams in millimeter-wave RF-beamforming phased array TRXs with decent noise and power performances.