A Fully Integrated QPSK/16-QAM <i>D</i>-Band CMOS Transceiver With Mixed-Signal Baseband Circuitry Realizing Digital Interfaces
Pingda Guan, Ruichang Ma, Haikun Jia, Wei Deng, Mingxing Deng, Jiamin Xue, Angxiao Yan, Shiyan Sun, Qiuyu Peng, Teerachot Siriburanon, Robert Bogdan Staszewski, Zhihua Wang, Baoyong Chi
Abstract
This work presents a fully integrated D-band transceiver (TRX) in 28-nm CMOS. The system architecture introduces a radio-frequency digital-to-analog converter (RF-DAC) and the complete mixed-signal baseband (BB) circuitry, including the equalizer, realizing fully digital BB interfaces at 24-Gb/s quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) and 48-Gb/s 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM). Innovations at the circuit level encompass: 1) the D-band RF front end (FE) using the proposed hybrid matching technique; 2) the two-stage conversion paths highlighting the Cartesian RF-DAC with an embedded four-tap finite impulse response (FIR) filter; 3) the local oscillator (LO) including an all-digital phase-locked loop (ADPLL) and the LO distribution network; and 4) the mixed-signal BB circuitry. The TRX achieves a transmitter (TX) bandwidth of 21 GHz, a receiver (RX) bandwidth of 18 GHz, a TX saturated output power (<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P_{\text {sat}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) of 13.1 dBm, a TX output 1-dB compression point (<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text {OP}_{\text {1 dB}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) of 7.5 dBm, and an RX noise figure (NF) of 9.3 dB.