A Quad-Band RX Phased-Array Receive Beamformer with Two Simultaneous Beams, Polarization Diversity, and 2.1–2.3 dB NF for C/X/Ku/Ka-Band SATCOM

This paper presents a wideband 16-channel dual-beam receive (RX) phased-array beamformer in a 90-nm SiGe BiCMOS process. Radio-frequency (RF) beamforming is implemented, and each channel has 5-bit phase control and 25 dB gain control. The dual-beam channel outputs are combined with two wideband Wilkinson networks. The chip has 27.3 dB electronic gain with a 3.4-28.7 GHz 3-dB bandwidth and a 2.1-2.3 dB noise figure (NF) up to 21 GHz. To the authors' knowledge, this work achieves the widest operating bandwidth among RX beamformers for satellite communication (SATCOM). Application areas are in phased arrays for C/X/Ku/Ka-band SATCOM ground terminals.

I. Introduction

Low-earth orbit (LEO) and medium-earth orbit (MEO) satellite constellations provide internet coverage to under-resourced areas when the cellular infrastructure is too expensive to implement. Electronically-scanned arrays (ESA) equipped with silicon beamformer chips are the workhorse of the next-generation SATCOM ground terminals as they can track the satellite with low latency and with no mechanical movement. Commercial SATCOM systems utilize C, X, Ku, and Ka bands (Fig. 1), and a terminal supporting all these bands in a single ESA offers a low-cost solution to the end users. Prior work has demonstrated SATCOM RX beamformers with competitive performance [1]–[6], but with frequency coverage of only one band.