Wideband mmWave Transceiver IC for 5G Radios

A wideband
$0.13\mu m$
SiGe BiCMOS direct-conversion transceiver chip for 5G communications in the Ka-band is presented. The receiver (RX) includes low-noise amplifiers (LNA) with variable gain, a quadrature down-converter with gain control, an IQ local-oscillator (LO) generation network and an active IQ baseband (BB) filter with a 28-224MHz adjustable cut-off frequency. It achieves a 5.5dB noise figure (NF) and a maximum input-referred 3rd order intercept point (IIP3) of -1dBm while having a gain control range of 90dB. The transmitter (TX) is comprised of an active IQ baseband filter with programmable cut-off frequency between 90-720MHz, an IQ LO generation network, an IQ up-converter with gain control, LO leakage compensation and a variable gain amplifier (VGA). It attains 12.8dBm saturated output power (Psat) and 20dBm output-referred 3rd order intercept point (OIP3) for 14dB maximum voltage gain, while having a gain control range of 50dB. The transceiver has 8-11GHz LO input and consumes 540mW in receive mode and 500mW in transmit mode from 2.6V supply.