A Ku-Band 8-Element Phased-Array Receiver in O.18-μm CMOS Technology

A 15-18 GHz 8-element phased-array receiver for wireless application is presented in this paper. Each element includes a low noise amplifier (LNA), a 5-bit passive phase shifter, a 4-bit attenuator. Two pre-amplifiers are applied to compensate the insertion loss of the passive circuits and attain a good gain. To achieve both the high linearity and low noise figure (NF), the two pre-amplifiers are placed after the attenuator and phase shifter, respectively. Utilizing a 0.18-μm CMOS processing, the system is demonstrated. The measurement results show that the single-channel receiving element achieves a maximal gain of 16.9 dB. From 15 GHz to 18 GHz, the tested minimum NF and input 1-dB compression point (IP
_1dB
) are 7.0 dB and -15.2 dBm, respectively. The root-mean-square (RMS) phase error and amplitude error are 2.3°~3.9° and 0.78~1.37 dB, respectively.