A K-Band Hybrid-Packaged Temperature-Compensated Phased-Array Receiver and Integrated Antenna Array

Abstract

This article presents an eight-channel 1.9-dB noise figure (NF) <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -band phased-array receiver (RX) for satellite communication (SATCOM). It employs the hybrid-packaged 65-nm CMOS beamformer and 0.1- <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> GaAs low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) based on the fan-out wafer-level chip-scale packaging (WLCSP) technology. For the power-efficient RX implementation, the power consumption of gain and phase tuning blocks is discussed, and the fully passive phase shifter (PS) and attenuator (ATT) are employed in this work. A global biasing scheme is proposed to ensure performance uniformity across temperature variations. Across the SATCOM band of 17.7–20.2 GHz, the proposed hybrid-packaged phased-array RX IC only consumes 30.2-mW dc power per channel and achieves < 1.2-dB gain variation and < 0.9-dB NF variation from −40° to 85 °C. Based on the RX IC, a dual-polarized 1024-element RX antenna array is further introduced. The measured gain-to-noise temperature ratios (G/Ts) are 6.22 and 6.51 dB/K at 19.7 GHz for left- and right-hand circular polarizations, respectively.