A 26-GHz transmitter front-end using double quadrature architecture.

Hyo-Sung Lee,Mingyo Park,Byung-Wook Min,Esteban Tlelo-Cuautle

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0216474

Hyo-Sung Lee, Mingyo Park + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0216474

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: May 23, 2019
Citations: 3	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Yonsei University, Georgia Institute of Technology

Abstract

A 26-GHz transmitter front-end is designed using 65 nm CMOS technology. The double frequency conversion transmitter consists of an intermediate frequency(IF) mixer, an millimeter-wave(mm-wave) mixer, and a pre-power amplifier. A double quadrature architecture is employed to accomplish image rejection without using an image rejection filter for the first time in the mm-wave frequency band. The IF mixer cores are designed as harmonic rejection mixers to avoid using IF filters. The measured conversion gain is 26.85±0.65 dB, with LO2 (IF LO) at 1–1.5 GHz and 26.9±0.6 dB with LO1 (mm-wave LO) at 27–29 GHz. The measured output return loss is less than -10 dB at 25.7–27.2 GHz. The output 1-dB compression point and the saturation output power measured at 26 GHz are 10 dBm and 14.1 dBm, respectively. The output-referred third-order intercept point (OIP3) measured at 26 GHz is 15.76 dBm. The third-order distortion, suppressed by the harmonic rejection mixer, is -60.5 dBc at an output power of 10 dBm. The error vector magnitude measured for OFDM 16-QAM with a 110-MHz signal bandwidth is -17.7 dB at an average output power of 3.5 dBm. The total power consumption of the proposed 26-GHz transmitter front-end is 267 mW, and it occupies a chip area of 2.31 mm2.

Highlights

With the explosive increase of wireless data capacity, the demand for fifth generation (5G) wireless communication systems has been increasing in recent years [1, 2]
Millimeter waves, including those in the 26-GHz spectrum, inherently suffer from significant propagation loss and less diffraction compared with 4G communication frequencies, which are below 6 GHz
2nd harmonic 2nd harmonic (IF mixer) and the frequency synthesizer will be necessary in future works, because the image rejection ratio (IRR) and the second order harmonic caused by the mm-wave mixer were above -30 dBc

Summary

Introduction

With the explosive increase of wireless data capacity, the demand for fifth generation (5G) wireless communication systems has been increasing in recent years [1, 2]. The IF mixer cores were designed as harmonic rejection mixers (HRMs) to avoid using IF filters for the first time in mm-wave transmitters, and achieve a high integration in the proposed transmitter.

Results

Conclusion