A Low-Power Radiation-Hardened Ka-Band CMOS Phased-Array Receiver for Small Satellite Constellation

This article introduces a low-power radiation-hardened $Ka$ -band CMOS phased-array receiver for the low Earth orbit (LEO) small satellite communication system. As the available solar panel area limits the power consumption of the receiver, a multi-coupling common-gate (CG) low noise amplifier (LNA) with current-sharing topology and built-in 180° phase shifter is proposed in this work to solve the power issue. The multi-coupling LNA utilizes three coupling inductors to reduce the input matching impedance with a smaller input CMOS transistor size. After implementing the proposed technique, a single beamformer realized a 3.4-mW typical power consumption compared with the conventional works with 17.3–195-mW power consumption. The receiver with magnetic-tuning phase shifter (MTPS) has 0.06-dB/Mrad gain and 0.4°/Mrad phase degradations and is the lowest reported root-mean-square phase and gain errors due to radiation. The proposed receiver achieves −22-dBm IIP3 with a 3.8-dB noise figure. The required on-chip area for each element is only 0.2 mm2. In the over-the-air (OTA) measurement, digital video broadcasting-second generation extension (DVB-S2x) standard modulated signals of up to 256 amplitude phase shift keying (APSK) can be supported by the proposed large array modules. This work realizes −33.2-dB error vector magnitude (EVM) and 12.8-Gb/s link speed with 1.6-GHz channel bandwidth. The measured beam pattern can cover radiated angle from −50° to +50° with lower than −10-dBc sidelobe level. Because of the proposed multi-coupling LNA and MTPS, a low-power radiation-hardened phased-array receiver for small LEO satellites can be achieved in this work.

I. Introduction

Emerging technologies are being developed to improve the wireless communication performances in the fifth-generation (5G) mobile network and beyond [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14]. There are two main technical directions for the 5G and beyond. One realistic direction is continually pursuing extremely high data rate network access with super high-frequency bands, such as -band and -band [15], [16], [17]. Another promising direction is non-terrestrial networks with extreme coverage extension, and low energy and cost [10], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22]. This article mainly focuses on the direction of wide coverage and low-energy non-terrestrial networks for the small satellite communication system.