A mm-wave CMOS/Si-Photonics Hybrid-Integrated Software-Defined Radio Receiver Achieving> 80-dB Blocker Rejection of < −10 dBm In-Band Blockers

This paper presents a hybrid-integrated mm-wave software-defined radio (SDR) receiver front-end implemented with silicon photonics and CMOS chips. The proposed SDR leverages a programmable silicon photonics IC (PIC) with high-Q filters to perform re-configurable channel-selection/image-rejection and jammer-rejection with tunable center frequency of 30–45 GHz, and 3–5 GHz bandwidth. Up to four out-of-band blockers are automatically detected and rejected simultaneously. Also, the desired mm-wave signal is mixed with a tunable local oscillator (LO) carrier and down-converted to a 2.5-GHz IF center frequency. Subsequently, the CMOS IC converts the current signal into an amplified voltage signal, thus compensating for PIC losses. The PIC is fabricated using a silicon-over-insulator (SOI) process, and the CMOS is fabricated using 28nm process. The receiver achieves> 80-dB rejection for two blockers and > 65-dB rejection for four blockers. The EVM measures -30-dB using a 100-MSymbol/s 64-QAM signal at the presence of a 10-dBc out-of-band blocker.