A K-Band Eight-Element Dual-Beam Receiver With Current-Sharing-Based Low-Power Technique for LEO SATCOM in 65-nm CMOS

This paper presents a K-band eight-element dual-beam receiver in 65-nm CMOS for satellite communications. Current-sharing low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) and passive beamforming networks (BFNs) arc employed to achieve low-power operation. Single power supply and daisychain digital-control scheme could simplify the phased array design. On-chip low dropout regulator (LDO) reduces the sensitivity of the channel gain to the supply-voltage variation by keeping a steady bias for the amplifiers. The chip utilizes a flip-chip chip-scale package (FCCSP) and occupies 5.2 x 6.4 mm2. Each element achieves an electronic gain of 25 dB, a noise figure (NF) of 2.7 dB, and an input-referred 1-dB gain compression point of 37 dBm at 19.5 GHz. Each element achieves a 360 degrees phase shifting range with a 5.625 degrees resolution and a 15.5-dB attenuation range with a 0.5-dB step. The total power consumption is 275.3 mW (corresponding to 17.2 mW per element per beam). The proposed receiver demonstrates the state-of-the-art NF among K-band beamformers in bulk CMOS processes.