Towards 100 Gbps: A Fully Electronic 90 Gbps One Meter Wireless Link at 230 GHz

In this paper we present a fully-electronic, high spectral efficiency one meter wireless link working at a maximum speed of 90 Gbps. It is based on a RF Tx and Rx front-end chipset working at a tunable carrier of 220-260 GHz. The chipset was manufactured in a SiGe 0.13 μm HBT technology with f _t /f _max =350/550 GHz. The Tx delivers a maximum output power of 8.5 dBm and its dc power consumption is 960 mW. The receiver peak conversion gain is 21 dB and its minimum single side band noise figure is 9.5 dB with a power consumption of 1 W. The 6-dB bandwidth measured between the Tx baseband input and the Rx baseband output is 15 GHz. To increase the speed of our previous work of 65 Gbps based on a QPSK modulation scheme, an increase in the spectral efficiency of the link is needed. Applying a back off in the Tx of 4 dB, a link based on a 16-QAM modulation scheme with an spectral efficiency of 2 bits per hertz was achieved. For data-rates of 80 Gbps and below, the EVM achieved was under 11.2%, while for 90 Gbps the measured EVM was 15%.