A 16-Element W-Band Phased-Array Transceiver Chipset With Flip-Chip PCB Integrated Antennas for Multi-Gigabit Wireless Data Links

This paper describes the design and implementation of a W-band phased-array system with printed circuit board (PCB) integrated antennas in two polarizations capable of multi-gigabit spectrally efficient wireless communication. The chipset is manufactured in a 0.18-μm SiGe BiCMOS technology with f
_T
/f
_MAX
of 240-/270-GHz and is flip-chipped onto a lowcost organic PCB with integrated antenna arrays. Each chip is equipped with 16-transmit/4-receive or 16-receive/4-transmit calibrated phase shifter elements and direct upand downconverters plus a half-rate phase-locked loop. The different system tradeoffs required to establish a multi-Gb/s wireless link at millimeter waves are carefully studied. Built-in element failure detectors, power detectors, and digital interface enable factory calibration and self-test capability. Each transceiver chip operates from 1.5and 2.5-V supplies and consumes 5.5 and 4.5 W in transmit and receive mode, respectively. The peak transmitter effective isotropic radiation power is 34 dBm in each polarization with a measured receiver noise figure of 6.5 dB at 94 GHz. At a distance of 1 m, a maximum wireless data rate of 30 Gb/s (per polarization) using 64-QAM can be achieved and at 20 m, 8 Gb/s (dual polarization) can be established using QPSK modulation.