A 50-Gb/s 134-GHz 16-QAM 3-m Dielectric Waveguide Transceiver System Implemented in 22-nm FinFET CMOS

This letter presents a 134-GHz superheterodyne transceiver system in 22-nm CMOS for dielectric waveguides measured at reaches up to 3 m. Greater than 12 GHz of RF bandwidth and 16 QAM signaling combine to achieve 50 Gb/s with a measured EVM of −19.8 dB (
$\sim 5\times 10^{-6}$
BER) at a total power consumption of 494 mW from a 1.0-V supply. External
$2\times 2$
matrix equalization is employed to equalize channel impairments. The system achieves an FoM of 3.3 pJ/bit/m with the highest reported data rate for waveguide links at a distance greater than 1 m to date. Key transceiver circuit building blocks are described, including RF signal paths, wideband baseband amplifiers, and filters, an IF amplifier with 44% fractional bandwidth and a coil-less 53.6-GHz quadrature divider.