Low-cost and low-power 60-GHz CMOS chip presented at ISSCC

Feb. 3, 2016

Leuven, Belgium, and San Francisco, CA. At this week’s IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco, nanoelectronics research center imec and Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) presented a four-antenna path beamforming transceiver for 60-GHz multi-Gb/s communication in 28-nm CMOS technology. The transceiver is a breakthrough in developing a small, low-cost, and low-power solution for multi-gigabit communication targeting WiGig as well as 60-GHz wireless backhaul applications.

Due to the tremendous growth of mobile-data-traffic, display, and audio applications, new spectral resources in the mmWave frequency bands are needed to support user demand for high data rates. One way to realize this is through mmWave wireless networks based on small outdoor cells featuring beamforming, a signal-processing technique using phased antenna arrays for directional transmission or reception. The beamforming steers the radiation in the desired direction while achieving a good link budget that supports high spectral efficiency.

Imec’s and VUB’s 60-GHz transceiver architecture features direct conversion and analog baseband beamforming with four antennas. The architecture is inherently simple and is not affected by image frequency interference. Moreover, a 24-GHz phase-locked loop that subharmonically locks a 60-GHz quadrature oscillator is inherently immune to the pulling disturbance of the 60-GHz power amplifier.

The prototype transceiver chip (7.9 mm2), implemented in 28-nm CMOS, integrates a four-antenna array. The chip was validated with an IEEE 802.11ad standard wireless link of 1 m. The transmitter consumes 670 mW and the receiver 431 mW at 0.9 V. The transmitter-to-receiver EVM was better than -20 dB in all the four WiGig frequency channels (58.32, 60.48, 62.64 and 64.8 GHz), with a transmitter equivalent isotropic radiated power (EIRP) of 24 dBm. This allows for QPSK as well as 16QAM modulations according to the IEEE 802.11ad standard, achieving very high data rates up to 4.62 Gb/s.

Interested companies are invited to join imec’s 60-GHz R&D as research partners and benefit from collaboration in imec’s Industrial Affiliation Program, development-on-demand, academic partnerships, or access to the technology for further development through licensing programs.

www.imec.be/imecmagazine

About the Author

Rick Nelson | Contributing Editor

Rick is currently Contributing Technical Editor. He was Executive Editor for EE in 2011-2018. Previously he served on several publications, including EDN and Vision Systems Design, and has received awards for signed editorials from the American Society of Business Publication Editors. He began as a design engineer at General Electric and Litton Industries and earned a BSEE degree from Penn State.

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