A Digital Frequency-Dependent I/Q Imbalance and Group Delay Estimation and Compensation Modules for mmWave Single Carrier Baseband Transceivers

This paper proposes the estimation and compensation modules of digital frequency-dependent (FD) I/Q imbalance and group delay for single carrier (SC) mode with 15 Gbps throughput rate in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) band. The proposed compensation module of a digital recursive filter can mitigate FD I/Q imbalance effects caused by the −3 dB corner imbalance of the reconstruction and anti-aliasing filters of I/Q branches. The proposed recursive filter with the appropriate initial coefficients based on the result of Golay sequence estimation can shorten the convergence time and precisely acquire the desired coefficients. The average image rejection ratio (IRR) performance after compensating by the proposed module can be improved from 21.97 dB to 47.54 dB. Besides, the group delay distortion in reconstruction and anti-aliasing filters will cause intersymbol interference to distort the in-band signal. We employ a digital equalization filter with the filter coefficients derived from the correlation results based on the Golay sequence to compensate the in-band group delay distortion. After the proposed group delay is pre-compensation at TX, the system-level performance of error vector magnitude (EVM) performance is improved by 6.21 dB to −27.78 dB to satisfy the IEEE 802.11ad/ay requirement in 64-QAM mode. The inner RX BER performance with the FD I/Q imbalance and the group delay compensation modules can achieve $3 \times 10^{-3}$ at 23 dB and also satisfy the system requirement at SNR of required 25.52 dB. A four-times parallelism architecture is proposed to work at a clock rate of 625 MHz with 64-QAM mode. The gate count and power consumption of the proposed design are 154.4 K and 16.2 mW, respectively.