A 57.3 to 66.2 GHz Millimeter-wave Wireless Link with CMOS Power Amplifier and Wideband Phase-locked Loop

A 57.3 to 66.2 GHz complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) wireless link composed of a power amplifier (PA) and a frequency synthesizer is introduced. The PA is realized by differential 4-path power combining, with a digitally-assisted dynamic power control loop to enhance power-added efficiency (PAE) during power back-off. The frequency synthesizer is featured by a wideband millimeter-wave phase-locked loop (PLL) cascaded by a low-frequency delay-locked loop (DLL). The PLL exploits an eight-phase XOR-gate phase detector for mutual spur compensation without degrading its phase noise. Simulation results have shown that the PA achieves a saturated output power of 17.9dBm with 12.6 % PAE, and the wireless link can recover data up to 20Gb/s.