A 37–43.5-GHz Fully Integrated 16-Element Phased-Array Transceiver With 64-QAM 7.2-Gb/s Data Rates Supporting Dual-Polarized MIMO

This letter presents a fully integrated 16-element phased-array transceiver (TRX) supporting dual-polarization multi-input multi-output (DP-MIMO). transmitting/receiving (T/R) switches are embedded for time division duplexing (TDD) operation. High-linearity bidirectional variable gain amplifiers (Bi-VGAs) and passive phase shifters (PSs) are designed for compact area and low power consumption, respectively. Fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS process, this TRX occupies an area of 25.76 mm2. With integrated frequency synthesizer, the TRX can work from 37 to 43.5 GHz, which can fully cover 5G new radio (NR) frequency range 2 (FR2) n259 and n260 bands. In the receiver (RX) mode, a noise figure (NF) of 5.4–6.3 dB and a peak conversion gain (CG) of 27.3 dB are achieved. The transmitter (TX) mode achieves a peak CG of 48.7 dB, a 13.1-dBm OP1 dB, and a 15.8-dBm
$P_{\mathrm {sat}}$
. By using 64-QAM modulation, measurement results show that the TRX achieves a data rate up to 7.2 Gb/s per independent data stream with 7.65 dBm output power per channel.