An Energy-Efficient 56-Gb/s D-Band TX-to-RX Link Using CMOS ICs and Transmitarray Antennas

This letter presents an energy-efficient system with a transmitter and a receiver comprising multichannel integrated circuits (ICs) in 45-nm CMOS technology and antennas-in-package feeding high-directivity planar lenses. Data rates up to 56 Gb/s are demonstrated over a 1-m point-to-point link using a full-digital communication system. The active circuits integrate multiple local oscillator generators for implementing a channel-aggregation architecture that provides a large radio frequency (RF) bandwidth (BW) using a significantly narrower baseband (BB) interface BW. The energy consumption of the overall system is only 33 pJ/bit.