A 50-Gb/s 134-GHz 16-QAM 3-m Dielectric Waveguide Transceiver System Implemented in 22-nm FinFET CMOS
Thomas W. Brown, Georgios C. Dogiamis, Yi-Shin Yeh, D. Correas-Serrano, Triveni S. Rane, Surej Ravikumar, Jessica C. Chou, Vijaya B. Neeli, Jabeom Koo, Mauricio Marulanda, Neelam Prabhu Gaunkar, Iwen Huang, Hariprasad Chandrakumar, Jeffery W. Bates, Zinia Tuli, Qiang Yu, Mario Weiss, Jag Rangaswamy, Carlos Nieva, Dimitri Frolov, Telesphor Kamgaing, Ye Seul Nam, Henning Braunisch, Said Rami
Abstract
This letter presents a 134 GHz superheterodyne transceiver system in 22nm CMOS for dielectric waveguides measured at reaches up to 3 meters. Greater than 12 GHz of RF bandwidth and 16 QAM signaling combine to achieve 50 Gbps with a measured EVM of -19.8 dB (5x10-6 BER) at a total power consumption of 494 mW from a 1.0 V supply. External 2x2 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 53.6GHz quadrature divider.