A Fully Integrated 60 GHz 10 Gb/s QPSK Transceiver with Digital Transmitter and T/R Switch in 65nm CMOS

Abstract

A fully integrated 60 GHz 10 Gb/s QPSK transceiver (TRX) with digital transmitter and T/R switch in 65nm CMOS is presented. The TRX consists of a direct-conversion receiver, a digital transmitter with on-chip QPSK modulator and a quadrature local-oscillation (LO) signals generation network with 20 GHz integer-N phase-locked loop (PLL) frequency synthesizer. A T/R switch is also integrated to interface with the antenna. RF bandwidth of the TRX is expanded to ~10GHz by using the magnetically coupled resonator based matching network. The QPSK modulation is directly realized in the I/Q digital power amplifier, which simplifies the transmitter complexity and reduces the power consumption. A 20 GHz integer-N PLL and a quadrature injection-locked frequency tripler (QILFT) are integrated on-chip to generate 60 GHz quadrature LO signals. The QILFT utilizes in-phase coupling technique to improve the LO I/Q matching and phase noise performance. The receiver achieves 7.1 dB noise figure and 25-47 dB dynamic gain range. The LO phase noise measured at the transmitter output is -93 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset from 60 GHz carrier. The measured error vector magnitude (EVM) of the transmitter is -23.9 dB for 10 Gb/s QPSK signals at 7 dBm output power. The EVM of the Over-the-Air (OTA) modulation-demodulation system is -16.3 dB for 10 Gb/s QPSK signals.