Millimeter-Wave CMOS Sourceless Receiver Architecture for 5G-Served Ultra-Low-Power Sensing and Communication Systems

In this paper, an extremely low-power and low-complexity CMOS sourceless millimeter-wave (mmW) receiver for the next-generation wireless communication and sensing systems including fifth-generation (5G) is proposed and demonstrated. It makes the use of injection-locked self-oscillating mixers (SOMs) in order to enable a direct conversion to baseband without resorting to any external local oscillator (LO) nor an IF processing block, therefore, greatly reducing power consumption, as well as the receiver's complexity. This architecture is created through multi-input and multi-output (MIMO) arrays in connection with slicing frequency spectrum or frequency band of interest. In this way, the proposed receiver supports a high data transmission throughput based on the frequency-diversified MIMO, which presents a unique feature in the architectural implementation of a low-power and high bit-rate communication and sensing systems. Transmission and demodulation of a digital modulated signal M-quadratic-amplitude modulation (M-QAM) at 40 GHz, is successfully demonstrated with simulated and measured results.