A ku-band common-leg transceiver with built-in configurable register in 130-nm CMOS technology for phased-array systems

Abstract

To solve the bottleneck of amplitude and phase accuracy deterioration caused by process and unpredictable errors, this paper proposes a Ku-band common-leg transceiver with built-in configurable register to achieve 64-state amplitude and phase accuracy correction, respectively, by redefining control codes of each state after taping out. Two-stage cascaded variable gain amplifiers (VGAs) and the vector-summing phase shifter (VSPS) with tail current source controlled by DAC are adopted to achieve large amplitude and phase coverage of 31.5 dB with the LSB of 0.5 dB and 360° with the LSB of 5.625°, respectively. According to the measurement results, in the frequency range of 14–18 GHz, the chip has amplitude accuracy with the root mean square (rms) error of ＜ 0.4 dB, while the rms phase error is ＜ 5.3°. The phase shifting accuracy is measured to be ＜ 2.2°, while the rms amplitude error is ＜ 0.67 dB. The receiving and transmitting channels have reference gain of 3.6–6 dB and 8–10.4 dB, respectively. The whole transceiver occupies 3 × 2.3 mm2 chip area including pads.