An Energy-Efficient 10-Gb/s CMOS Millimeter-Wave Transceiver With Direct-Modulation Digital Transmitter and I/Q Phase-Coupled Frequency Synthesizer

A fully integrated energy-efficient 10-Gb/s millimeter-wave transceiver with direct-modulation digital transmitter (TX) and I/ Q phase-coupled frequency synthesizer in 65 nm CMOS is presented. The transceiver consists of a direct-conversion receiver (RX), a digital TX with on-chip QPSK modulation, and a quadrature local-oscillation (LO) generation network with a 20-GHz phase-locked loop (PLL) frequency synthesizer. A T/R switch is integrated to interface with an E-shaped patch antenna. The QPSK modulation is directly realized in the I/ Q digital power amplifier (DPA), which simplifies the TX complexity and reduces the power consumption. A 20-GHz sub-sampling PLL (SSPLL) and a quadrature phased-coupled injection-locked oscillator (QILO) are integrated on-chip to generate 60-GHz quadrature LO signals. The QILO utilizes in-phase coupling technique to improve the LO I/ Q matching and phase noise performance. The RX achieves 7.1-dB noise figure (NF) and 25- to 47-dB dynamic gain range. The LO phase noise measured at the TX output is −115.6 dBc/Hz at 10 MHz offset from 60 GHz carrier. The measured error vector magnitude (EVM) of the TX 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 −13.8 dB for 10-Gb/s QPSK signals. The transceiver achieves the 10-Gb/s data rate while consuming 340.4 mW. The energy efficiency is 34 pJ/bit. This work demonstrates the fully functional wireless link based on the proposed mm-wave transceiver, which highlights the possibility of energy-efficient solution for future high throughputs mm-wave wireless systems.