A CMOS Ka-Band SATCOM Transceiver with ACI-Cancellation Enhanced Dual-Channel Low-NF Wide-Dynamic-Range RX and High-Linearity TX

This paper presents the first Ka-band satellite communication (SATCOM) transceiver in standard CMOS technology. The proposed Ka-band SATCOM transceiver is based on direct-conversion architecture with high-linearity TX and dual-channel multi-mode RX, which is designed for a earth ground platform communicating with Geostationary (GEO) and low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. The dual-channel RX enables multiple duplexing modes, which are polarization duplexing and frequency duplexing. In the receiver, both the RF path and the baseband path provide variable gain for a wider dynamic range. The LNA employs dual-coupling transformer for low noise figure and wideband input matching. An adjacent channel interference (ACI) cancellation scheme is proposed to further enhance the RX dynamic range in frequency duplexing mode. In the transmitter single-turn high-quality-factor transformer is employed to realize matching network and four-way power combining. A prototype of the SATCOM transceiver is fabricated in a standard 65-nm CMOS process. Under 1.05 V supply voltage, the transmitter achieves a P
_SAT
of 19 dBm and an average output power of 10.6 dBm with 2 % EVM and 42.9 dB ACPR. The dual channel receiver achieves a single-sideband NF of 5.0 dB, IIP3 of 0.2 dBm and with a 10.4 dB ACI suppression.