Reconfigurable E-band Receiver Development for Joint Communication and Sensing

In this paper, a co-design methodology including link level simulation for an E-band reconfigurable receiver is presented. Receiver building blocks operating at 71 GHz- 76 GHz are developed to meet the needs of joint communication and sensing, targeted at smart systems for automotive applications. A reconfigurable architecture is proposed to reduce the silicon area, power consumption and other overheads of the realization. In a direct conversion architecture, the low noise amplifier (LNA) and mixer are designed to meet the wide bandwidth of such a mmWave system. The differential LNA provides a gain of 22.2 dB and a noise figure of 1.97 dB at 73.5 GHz. The mixer achieves a voltage gain of 6.6 dB and a noise figure of 7.8 dB. With the help of a Python based simulation framework, the feasibility of a joint communications/radar system is shown, by embedding a model of the circuit behaviour into a physical-layer simulation.