An Eight-Element 140-GHz Wafer-Scale IF Beamforming Phased-Array Receiver With 64-QAM Operation in CMOS RFSOI

This article presents a 140-GHz eight-element wafer-scale phased-array receiver based on intermediate-frequency (IF) beamforming with 5-bit phase and 4-bit gain control. The chip contains a shared local-oscillator (LO) multiplier chain and distribution network, active combiners, LC-based combiners, digitally tuned attenuators, for a near system-on-chip solution. A differential on-chip antenna feed (on the top metal) is electromagnetically (EM) coupled to a high-efficiency patch antenna (gold) on a 100-μm-thick quartz superstrate, and placed λ/2 (~140 GHz) apart in the horizontal and vertical directions. The 4x 2-element phased-array chip with attached quartz superstrate is wire-bonded to a printed circuit board containing IF and LO ports, and scans to ±35° in the elevation plane (E-plane). The measured channel NF is 7 dB and the array electronic gain is 27-28 dB with an RF front-end 3-dB bandwidth of 139-155 GHz and an IF bandwidth of 9.5-12.5 GHz. To evaluate the over-the-air performance, a communication link is demonstrated with 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and 64-QAM waveforms, realizing up to 9-10-Gb/s data rates. To the best of our knowledge, this article presents the first CMOS wafer-scale phased-array receiver at 140 GHz with a low system noise figure and high data rate.