A 84.48-Gb/s 64-QAM CMOS D-Band Channel-Bonding Tx Front-End With Integrated Multi-LO Frequency Generation

In this letter, an ultra-broadband D-band wireless front-end transmitter (TX) in 45-nm CMOS SOI is proposed. Based on channel bonding and 64-QAM modulation, it achieves 84.8-Gb/s data rate by combining 8 × 2.16 GHz baseband channels. The eight baseband channels are aggregated at intermediate frequency (IF) in two sets of four channels and then upconverted to two adjacent sub-bands at D-band. The required millimeter-wave local oscillators (LOs) are generated on-chip. The IF band is 57.96 to 66.66 GHz, and the considered transmission band is from 140.895 to 158.265 GHz. The presented TX integrates two upconverter mixers, two power amplifiers, and an on-chip power combiner in addition to the two LO genertors with a total dc power consumption of 420 mW from a 1-V voltage supply, and occupies a compact active area of 2.98 mm
²
.