60 GHz Radio Transceiver System for Energy Efficient Communication Systems

Wireless transmission infrastructure for high data rates requires broadband radio links at millimeter-wave frequencies. To aggregate high data throughput, signals from several modems in the 5GHz Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) band are upconverted to an intermediate frequency in the 60GHz band using integrated chips for frequency conversion and signal amplification in a transceiver system operating above 140GHz. In addition, a local oscillator (LO) based on a frequency synthesizer was developed to provide 9.3GHz LO signals for up to four transmitter and receiver modules. Since energy efficiency is a key feature for 140GHz broadband links, the modules are equipped with power monitors to measure the instantaneous power consumption of the individual transceiver components with high resolution in time. The transmitter module provides a maximum conversion gain of 6.3dB for the upper sideband around 61.3GHz, while the lower sideband around 50.3GHz is suppressed by 16.2dB. The receiver module provides conversion gain of 2.2dB for the radio frequency signal, whereas the image signal is suppressed by 23.7dB. The entire transceiver systems provides an error vector magnitude below 6% operating within its system bandwidth.