Teledyne Scientific & Imaging and Teledyne LeCroy today announced that researchers at the Microwave Electronics Lab at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have reached record-breaking signal transmission speeds of D-band wireless communication. The experiment was conducted using a Tx/Rx chipset developed by researchers at Chalmers University, using Teledyne Scientific’s high performance Indium Phosphide (InP)-based double heterojunction bipolar transistor technology (DHBT) and the Teledyne LeCroy 10 Zi oscilloscope. A data rate of 44 Gb/s was achieved, doubling the previous record.
Advances in wireless transmission further reduce the need for long cables and enable the delivery of high-resolution video to users without the delays inherent to wired networks. Results of the experiment were published at the 2014 IEEE Compound Semiconductor IC Symposium.
“The Teledyne Indium Phosphide DHBT-MMIC process plays a vital role in our program due to the wide bandwidths that can be achieved in the circuits,” said Professor Herbert Zirath, leader of the Chalmers research program, which is supported by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF). “We could not have set the record without this process, and more recently we have pushed the record out to 48 Gb/s. The goal of our program is to reach 100 Gb/s, and we plan on using additional Teledyne LeCroy equipment to analyze receiver outputs in the next phase of our research.”
Teledyne technology and equipment was at the heart of the record-breaking demonstration. The Tx/Rx chipset was designed in Teledyne Scientific’s ultrahigh-speed InP DHBT technology. The technology features a 250-nm minimum feature size and has demonstrated record-breaking RF performance with higher breakdown voltage and dynamic range than can be obtained in competing silicon technologies. This demonstration was the first implementation of an InP DHBT chipset for D-band data transmission. The chipset was developed specifically for point-to-point wireless communications, including D-band, 4G and 5G markets.
To view and analyze the demodulated QPSK signal, Teledyne LeCroy 10 Zi oscilloscopes were used, including the 65 GHz 10-65Zi. The oscilloscope’s serial data analysis capability was used to analyze the demodulated I & Q signals, especially the eye diagrams, and to apply equalization and predict the BER performance at 44 Gb/s. The 10 Zi platform’s industry-leading bandwidth and 130-fs channel matching is key to the acquisition and analysis of I and Q signals from coherent optical receivers.
