A V-Band OOK Transmitter with 14.5Gbps Data Rate and 11.1% DCto-RF Efficiency in 65nm CMOS

This paper presents an energy-efficient V-band onoff keying (OOK) transmitter (TX), which integrates a voltagecontrolled oscillator (VCO), a broadband passive modulator, and a broadband baseband amplifier (BBA). A power-oriented design methodology is used in the oscillator design for maximum output power. The passive modulator is a distributed single-pole singlethrow (SPST) structure consisting of a transmission line with two switches. The modulator achieves a modulation bandwidth of up to 30GHz, a high on-off ratio of more than 19dB, and an insertion loss of less than 3.6dB. Implemented in a 65nm LP CMOS process, the TX supports a data rate of 14.5 Gbps with a bit error rate (BER) less than 1×10<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-12</sup>. The maximum output power is 4.5dBm with a peak DC-to-RF efficiency of 11.1%, leading to a high figure-of-merit (FoM) value of 1.61.