A 42.24 Gb/s Channel Bonding Up-Converter with integrated multi-LO generation in 45nm CMOS

This paper presents an energy-efficient wideband Vband channel-bonding up-converter. The circuit, fabricated in 45nm CMOS RFSOI technology is composed of four lanes and an output hybrid combiner based on differential coupled lines. The circuit has four I and Q inputs and each one gets up-converted to a different channel at V-band at the output. The four required LO frequencies (58.32, 60.48, 62.64 and 64.48 GHz) are generated onchip using high integer number frequency multiplication from a common reference input at2.16 GHz that sets the channel spacing. Four-channel 64-QAM modulation is demonstrated with a total data rate of 42.24 Gb/s and 9.9 pJ/b of energy efficiency.