A Low-Power 256-Element Ka-Band CMOS Phased-Array Receiver With On-Chip Distributed Radiation Sensors for Small Satellite Constellations

This article presents a low-power 256-element $Ka$ -band CMOS phased-array receiver utilizing ON-chip distributed radiation sensors for the low Earth orbit (LEO) small satellite communication system. Since the available solar cell area limits the power generation of the small LEO satellites, a distributed current-sharing common-gate (CG) low noise amplifier (LNA) and a voltage-tuning variable gain amplifier (VGA) are introduced to reduce power consumption. After utilizing the proposed technique, the power consumption of the beamformer is 2.95 mW/element. Moreover, the proposed voltage-tuning VGA is configured to utilize both upper and lower transistors for gain contributions to save power. The ON-chip distributed radiation sensors are presented to eliminate the non-uniform radiation influence and realize 0.22-dB/Mrad gain degradation performance. The proposed receiver achieves −20-dBm single-element IIP3 with a 3.6-dB noise figure. The occupied ON-chip area for a single element is only 0.24 mm2. DVB-S2X standard modulated signals of up to 256 amplitude and phase-shift keying (APSK) can be supported in the over-the-air (OTA) measurement. The receiver achieves −31.3-dB EVM and 24-Gb/s link speed under 1.5-GBaud dual-linear polarization signals. The measured 256-element beam pattern can cover radiated angle from −50° to +50° with lower than −9-dBc sidelobe level. Thanks to the proposed low-power distributed current-sharing CG LNA and ON-chip radiation sensors, a low-power radiation-hardened phased-array receiver can be achieved for the small LEO satellites.

I. Introduction

High-performance wireless communication systems are being provided by the 5th generation mobile network (5G) and beyond [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7]. Spectrum resource at the millimeter-wave frequency band is ready to boost the available data rate with enlarged channel bandwidth. There are two technical directions for the 5G and beyond communication systems. One promising direction is continually proceeding along the extremely high data rate with higher frequency bands such as -band and -band [8], [9]. Another potential direction is satellite communication networks with extreme coverage and low cost and energy [3], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14]. This article focuses on the direction of wide coverage and low-energy small satellite communication networks.