A Scalable 1024-Element 26-Ghz Phased Array Transceiver for Millimeter-Wave Communication

A 1024-element phased array radio frequency (RF) front-end is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a millimeter-wave (mmWave) magneto-electric (ME) dipole antenna is designed. The compact antenna is composed of one ME dipole and one substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) cavity. It's designed with a singlelayer printed circuit board (PCB) laminate. The -10dB impedance bandwidth of the antenna ranges from 24.29 GHz to 28.21 GHz. Within low peak gain fluctuation, the radiation pattern can widely scan in the azimuth and elevation plane from 24 GHz to 27 GHz. Low cross-polarization can be maintained. Then, a scalable 1024-element phased array with a center frequency of 26 GHz has been designed and fabricated by the antenna-on-board (AoB) architecture. The phased array is constructed by transmit/receive (TRX) SiGe beamformer chips and the simple ME dipole antenna. The proposed phased array transceiver is suitable for a mmWave macro site or targetdetection mmWave radar. To the best of our knowledge, this RF front-end is the first 1024-element phased array transceiver by SiGe chips with the highest measured effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) for a single linear polarization so far.