A 76-Gbit/s 265-GHz CMOS Receiver With WR-3.4 Waveguide Interface

A 76-Gbit/s 265-GHz CMOS receiver (RX) modularized with a WR-3.4 waveguide interface is presented. It is a mixer-first RX fabricated using a 40-nm CMOS technology. The primary design focus is simplicity and the resulting low noise and loss and high conversion gain (CG). To allow for both on-wafer and packaged measurements, ON-chip transmission lines are designed such that their characteristics are relatively insensitive to the presence or absence of adhesive covering the chip. The RX chip is flip-chip-mounted on a multilayer printed circuit board (PCB). Built into the PCB is a waveguide transition using double-resonant stacked patches for wideband operation. The CMOS RX module achieves the highest wireless data rate of 76 Gbit/s with 16 QAM, which is comparable to 80 Gbit/s reported previously for a CMOS RX with on-wafer probing measurement.