Co-Design of 60-GHz Wideband Front-End IC With On-Chip T/R Switch Based on Passive Macro-Modeling

Abstract

Co-design of 60-GHz wideband front-end integrated circuit (IC) with on-chip transmit/receive (T/R) switch in 65-nm CMOS is presented. Passive macro-modeling (pmm) is utilized to convert S-parameter files from passive component electromagnetic simulations to state-space models in circuit netlist format that could be used in a commercial SPICE simulator for various analyses without convergence issues. The co-design of the on-chip switch and the low-noise amplifier (LNA)/power amplifier could achieve wideband matching and reduce the effects of insertion loss of the on-chip T/R switch. Combining with the gain-boosting technique in the LNA design and lumped-component-based design methodology, the implemented 60-GHz front-end IC with an on-chip T/R switch achieves 3-dB gain bandwidth (BW) of 12 GHz with a maximum gain of 17.8 dB and minimum noise figure of 5.6 dB in the receiver mode and 3-dB gain BW of 10 GHz with saturated output power of 5.6 dBm in the transmitter mode, and only consumes 1.0 mm × 1.2 mm die area (including pads).