A 24.3-to-44.8 GHz Reconfigurable Dual-Band T/R Front-End with An Implicit Switch-based Antenna Interface Supporting 600MSym/s 64QAM

This paper presents a multi-band front-end module (FEM) with a built-in transmit/receive (T/R) switch in 28 nm standard CMOS technology for 5G NR communication. A T/R switch topology is proposed to separate the design processes of the power amplifier (PA) and the low noise amplifier (LNA), which reduces the insertion loss in Tx mode caused by the T/R switch. To enable cover the all 5G NR bands at 28 GHz and 39 GHz, a four-coupled inductor-based reconfigurable inductor is used to shift the operational band in the interstage matching network of the low noise amplifier (LNA) and power amplifier (PA). Identical signal paths are used for both the LNA and PA. The FEM consists of a two-stage pseudo-differential PA with a cascade output stage to obtain high output power, a single-end LNA with two-stage cascade to achieve high power gain, and a compact and relatively low insertion loss T/R switch. The measured OP1dB and PAEOP1dB in Tx mode are 17.42 dBm and 16.36%, respectively. The measured NFmin in Rx mode is 5.65 dB. A 64-QAM 600 MSym/s single-carrier was measured in Tx mode.