A scalable 64-element 28 ghz phased-array transceiver with 50 dbm eirp and 8-12 gbps 5g link at 300 meters without any calibration

This paper presents a 28 GHz 5G communication link using 64-element (8×8) phased-arrays. The design is based on quad-core (2×2) transmit/receive (TRX) beamformer chips with 6-bit phase control in SiGe BiCMOS. Sixteen of these chips are assembled on a 12-layer printed circuit board (PCB) together with a Wilkinson combiner/divider network and stacked patch antennas. The antenna can achieve an S11 bandwidth of 4 GHz (28-32 GHz) and the array has a measured saturated EIRP of 50 dBm with 5 GHz 3-dB bandwidth. The phased-array can scan to ±50° in azimuth (H-plane) and ±25° in elevation (E-plane) with low sidelobes and without any calibration. A 300 meter wireless link is demonstrated with a data rate of 8-12 Gbps over all scan angles using 16-/64-QAM waveforms. To our knowledge, this is the highest data rate at the longest link distance demonstrated for a single-beam 28 GHz 5G array.