A 60-GHz 144-Element Phased-Array Transceiver for Backhaul Application

Abstract

A 144-element phased array transceiver is realized using a modular tiled approach that supports 802.11ad, MCS12 single carrier 16-quadratic-amplitude modulation (QAM) 4.6 Gbps, in the 60-GHz band. It consists of a system-on-a chip (SOC) (MAC/PHY/BB to IF) in 28-nm CMOS, and one IF-to-60-GHz transceiver master chip driving twelve 60-GHz phased array transceiver slave chips fabricated in a 40-nm CMOS. Using the master-slave configuration, the 60-GHz transceiver with 12 phase-controlled TX/RX slices is expanded to 144 phase-controlled slices. Each final TX/RX slice is then connected to two patch antennas on LTCC substrate. A tiled approach is used to create the 288 patch antenna array out of six identical tiles each with two slave 60-GHz transceivers connected to a 48-element antenna array. The single tile phased array with 48 antennas has a measured beam steering scan angle of 60° in azimuth and 10° in elevation. The full phased array transceiver with 288 antennas has a measured over the air (OTA) max effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) of 51 dBm at saturated power (PSAT), and EIRP of 44.8 dBm with -22 dB EVM for MCS12 (16QAM-4.6 Gbps) at broadside. It has an OTA measured sensitivity of -87.3 and -80.4 dBm for MCS9 (QPSK-2.5 Gbps) and MCS12, respectively, at broadside. A packet error rate of 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-5</sup> was measured for MCS9 and MCS12 with an OTA input power of -85 and -77.5 dBm, respectively, for the full phased array transceiver at broadside.