A Fully Integrated 60 GHz 10 Gb/s QPSK Transceiver with Digital Transmitter and T/R Switch in 65nm CMOS

A fully integrated 60 GHz 10 Gb/s QPSK transceiver (TRX) with digital transmitter and T/R switch in 65nm CMOS is presented. The TRX consists of a direct-conversion receiver, a digital transmitter with on-chip QPSK modulator and a quadrature local-oscillation (LO) signals generation network with 20 GHz integer-N phase-locked loop (PLL) frequency synthesizer. A T/R switch is also integrated to interface with the antenna. RF bandwidth of the TRX is expanded to similar to 10GHz by using the magnetically coupled resonator based matching network. The QPSK modulation is directly realized in the I/Q digital power amplifier, which simplifies the transmitter complexity and reduces the power consumption. A 20 GHz integer-N PLL and a quadrature injection-locked frequency tripler (QILFT) are integrated on-chip to generate 60 GHz quadrature LO signals. The QILFT utilizes in-phase coupling technique to improve the LO I/Q matching and phase noise performance. The receiver achieves 7.1 dB noise figure and 25-47 dB dynamic gain range. The LO phase noise measured at the transmitter output is -93 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset from 60 GHz carrier. The measured error vector magnitude (EVM) of the transmitter is -23.9 dB for 10 Gb/s QPSK signals at 7 dBm output power. The EVM of the Over-the-Air (OTA) modulation-demodulation system is -16.3 dB for 10 Gb/s QPSK signals.