Design of a 60-GHz Joint Radar–Communication Transceiver With a Highly Reused Architecture Utilizing Reconfigurable Dual-Mode Gilbert Cells

A 60-GHz joint radar-communication (JRC) transceiver is presented in this article. To achieve a compact JRC transceiver architecture with highly reused RF modules, a dedicated reconfigurable dual-mode Gilbert cell is proposed. Specifically, in the communication mode, the dual-mode Gilbert cells operate as conventional upconversion mixers to modulate the baseband (BB) communication data, while it could also be configured as an amplifier to strengthen the LO signal in the radar mode. Compared with the quadrature IF chirp modulation scheme in which the chirp bandwidth is constrained by the narrowband IF devices, in this work, a wideband chirp generated directly from the LO chain could be applied for radar sensing, significantly improving the range resolution in the radar mode. Besides, the direct RF dechirping could also relieve the hardware burden during radar signal processing compared with the digital dechirping utilized in the IF chirp modulation scheme. Fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS process, this JRC transceiver realizes an ultracompact chip size, and a 16-dBm saturated TX output power, an 11-dBm OP1 dB, and a 5.8-dB minimum RX noise figure (NF) are also achieved. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed JRC transceiver supports >4-GHz transmitted chirp bandwidth with <3.75-cm range resolution in the radar mode, and a mechanical vibration with 1-<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu $ </tex-math></inline-formula>m displacement is successfully detected. Besides, a >7-Gb/s data rate in the 16-QAM over-the-air (OTA) communication is also demonstrated.