The Design-for-Cost of millimeter-wave Front-End for 5G and Beyond

Millimeter-wave techniques and MIMO techniques are the key techniques for 5G and beyond. Fully integrated millimeter-wave front-ends are one of the key solutions for reducing the overall system costs and the sizes. It is not so challenging to realize working integrated millimeter-wave front-ends technically, the key of the success for 5G and beyond is the overall low cost for potential commercial implementations. Therefore, Design-for-Cost (DfC) becomes the key challenging. This paper compares the implementations basing on both CMOS 65nm and SiGe 0.18um technologies and the results show that the cost using CMOS 65nm is more than 3.3 times higher than that of using SiGe 0.18um, meanwhile, integrated millimeter-wave front-ends by using SiGe 0.18um technology have much better reliability than that of using CMOS 65nm.