A 70-Mb/s 100.5-dBm Sensitivity 65-nm LP MIMO Chipset for WiMAX Portable Router

Abstract

In this paper, we present a low-power high-performance WiMAX chipset fully compliant with IEEE 802.16e specification corrigendum 1, 2 for mobile broadband access and WiMAX Forum system profile Wave2. The chipset is comprised of a 632.7-mW/24.99-mm2 modem/router chip and a 364-mW/11.05- mm2 dual-band 2 × 2 MIMO RF transceiver chip, both developed in 65-nm CMOS process. The proposed chipset is capable of handling a maximum peak WiMAX downlink (DL) throughput of 70 Mbps. Moreover, the chipset can reach up to -100.5-dBm sensitivity in a 10-MHz AWGN channel, which outperforms WiMAX Forum mobile radio conformance test (MRCT) by 9.5 dB. Such high sensitivity is due to the proposed low-noise high-linearity RF transceiver chip, which has 2.5-dB RX noise figure (NF) and -37-dB TX error vector magnitude (EVM), and the applied high-performance baseband signal processing algorithms. Several low-power design techniques-from SW level, firmware/DSP level, to HW module level-have been implemented to enable portable applications. The modem/router chip is highly integrated and has rich features and various interfaces for applications such as router or VoIP phone. Furthermore, this is the only published WiMAX chipset which has been in mass production.