300-GHz 160-Gb/s InP-HEMT Wireless Front-End With Fully Differential Architecture

This paper presents a 300-GHz-band 160-Gb/s fully differential integrated transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) front-end (FE) that is based on our in-house $60-\mathrm{nm}$ InP high-electron mobility transistor (InP-HEMT) technology. To integrate the RF power amplifier (PA) and mixer while avoiding RF PA saturation caused by the mixer’s LO leakage (LOL), the proposed fully differential $F E$ architecture uses a double-balanced mixer, high common-mode rejection differential amplifier, and LO phase inverter (LOPI). The TX and RX modules achieve a conversion gain (CG) of above 5 dB over wide bandwidths of 35 and 56 GHz, respectively. We successfully demonstrated 16QAM $160-\mathrm{Gb} / \mathrm{s}$ back-to-back data transmission using the proposed FE. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the highest reported data rate achieved with a 300-GHz-band FE.