A 20.8-Gbps dual-carrier wireless communication link in 220-GHz band

Abstract

With the successful demonstration of terahertz (THz) high-speed wireless data transmission, the THz frequencies are now becoming a worth candidate for post-5G wireless communications. On the other hand, to bring THz communications a step closer to real scenario application, solving high data rate realtime transmission is also an important issue. This paper describes a 220-GHz solid-state dual-carrier wireless link whose maximum transmission real-time data rates are 20.8 Gbps (10.4 Gbps per channel). By aggregating two carrier signals in the THz band, the contradiction between high real-time data rate communication and low sampling rate analog-to-digital (ADC) and digital-to-analog converter (DAC) is alleviated. The transmitting and receiving front-ends consist of 220-GHz diplexers, 220-GHz sub-harmonic mixers based on anti-parallel Schottky barrier diodes, G-band low-noise amplifiers (LNA), WR-4.3 band high-gain Cassegrain antennas, high data rates dual-DAC and -ADC baseband platform and other components. The low-density parity-check (LDPC) encoding is also realized to improve the bit error rate (BER) of the received signal. Modulated signals are centered at 214.4 GHz and 220.6 GHz with -11.9 dBm and -13.4 dBm output power for channel 1 and 2, respectively. This link is demonstrated to achieve 20.8-Gbps real-time data transmission using 16-QAM modulation over a distance of 1030 m. The measured signal to noise ratio (SNR) is 17.3 dB and 16.5 dB, the corresponding BER is 8.6e-7 and 3.8e-7, respectively. Furthermore, 4K video transmission is also carried out which is clear and free of stutter. The successful transmission of aggregated channels in this wireless link shows the great potential of THz communication for future wireless high-rate real-time data transmission applications.