A 3-to-40 GHz 64QAM/256QAM/4096QAM Zero-IF CMOS Transceiver Chipset for Millimeter-wave Software-defined Radios

The widely available frequency spectrum at the millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) band can be adopted to achieve high-speed wireless communication in Wi-Fi, cellular, and wireless backhaul systems While there are extensive research, development, and demonstration of mm-Wave systems, the software-defined radios (SDRs) for mm-Wave, which offer flexibility, adaptability, and cost-efficiency, are still very much in its infancy as compared to the SDR for sub-6 GHz. A major challenge for the mm-Wave SDR is the lack of low-cost and portable mm-Wave transceivers covering sub-GHz to several tens of GHz frequency range continuously. Authors in [1]–[3] demonstrate ultra-wideband mm-Wave front-ends for phased-array systems using SiGe technology with high cost and low integration level. A 0.3-to-40 GHz receiver (RX) [4] and a 24-to-71 GHz RX [5] using CMOS technology are reported. However, only few ultra-wideband RXs with larger than 150% fractional bandwidth are published and there is no ultra-wideband CMOS TX and RX chipset for mm-Wave SDRs reported in open literature so far. To demonstrate the possibility and feasibility of transceivers for mmWave SDRs, this paper introduces a 64QAM/256QAM/1024QAM 4096QAM zero-IF 3-to-40 GHz TX and 0.03-to-40 GHz RX chipset in CMOS technology. In addition, several ultra-wideband RF/mm-wave circuit design challenges in the building blocks are addressed. This paper demonstrates the completely fully functional TX-to-RX link with a data rate of $7.2 \mathrm{~Gb} / \mathrm{s}$ with outstanding measured system performance based on the proposed transceiver chipset.