21.6 A Sub-6GHz 5G New Radio RF Transceiver Supporting EN-DC with 3.15Gb/s DL and 1.27Gb/s UL in 14nm FinFET CMOS

To carry on the explosion of mobile data traffic, cellular networks have evolved to enhance air capacity with emerging 5G New Radio (NR) technologies. Thanks to carrier aggregation (CA) and advanced-MIMO techniques, the NR devices can attain up to several Gb/s peak data-rate. The demand of high bandwidth has created a need for exploring high-frequency spectrum over 3GHz, while sustaining legacy LTE bands for LTE-NR dual connectivity (EN-DC). Since User Equipment (UE) requires small form-factor and low power consumption, a single-chip RF transceiver is essential to cover both NR and legacy protocols, simultaneously. This paper demonstrates an integrated CMOS RFIC that supports multimode and multiband applications including all the legacy 2G, 3G, 4G and stand-alone/non-stand-alone sub-6GHz 5G NR features.