A 27.8Gb/s 11.5pJ/b 60GHz transceiver in 28nm CMOS with polarization MIMO

The industry-wide impetus on user experience and immersive content for handheld/wearable consumer devices is accelerating the demand for high-speed millimeter-wave (mm-wave) PAN wireless connectivity. Next-generation 60GHz PAN standards [1] have made it mandatory to achieve >20Gb/s rates using wide (4.32GHz or higher) bandwidth. However, in order to support multiple concurrent high-speed links, it is imperative to achieve high spectral efficiency. MIMO techniques allow for such spectrum reuse by employing simultaneous spatial streams. However, unlike at low-GHz frequencies, which exhibit rich multipath scattering and therefore a high-rank TX-RX MIMO channel matrix, mm-wave propagation is fundamentally less diverse due to higher reflection/absorption.