A $C$ -Band Slat-Type Phased-Array Receiver With Co-Aperture Concurrent Eight Beams

This article presents a $C$ -band multibeam phased-array receiver for high-throughput wireless communications. The proposed four-element beamformer supports 1–8 co-aperture simultaneously reconfigurable beams and demonstrates a 23-dB gain and a 6.5-dB noise figure (NF) at 5 GHz. In addition, it leverages a large-signal nonlinearity cancellation scheme and achieves a $-$ 10.8-dBm input 1-dB gain compression point (IP $_\text{1dB}$ ) and a $-$ 4.7-dBm input third-order intermodulation intercept point (IIP $_3$ ) at 5.5 GHz. By using the proposed merged gain-programmable phase shifter (GPS) technique, the beamformer achieves 32-path amplitude and phase control with high accuracy and a compact chip area. The entire chip occupies 6.4 $\times$ 3.1 mm $^2$ area and consumes 1265 mW. To tackle the design challenge of the onboard multibeam-forming network, the proposed receive phased array adopts a scalable slat-type array configuration, enabling a low-cost design with high isolation. To the authors’ knowledge, this work demonstrates the largest number of concurrent co-aperture beams among integrated radio frequency (RF)-beamforming phased arrays.