A K-Band Hybrid-Packaged Temperature-Compensated Phased-Array Receiver and Integrated Antenna Array

This article presents an eight-channel 1.9-dB noise figure (NF) $K$ -band phased-array receiver (RX) for satellite communication (SATCOM). It employs the hybrid-packaged 65-nm CMOS beamformer and 0.1- $\mu \text{m}$ GaAs low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) based on the fan-out wafer-level chip-scale packaging (WLCSP) technology. For the power-efficient RX implementation, the power consumption of gain and phase tuning blocks is discussed, and the fully passive phase shifter (PS) and attenuator (ATT) are employed in this work. A global biasing scheme is proposed to ensure performance uniformity across temperature variations. Across the SATCOM band of 17.7–20.2 GHz, the proposed hybrid-packaged phased-array RX IC only consumes 30.2-mW dc power per channel and achieves < 1.2-dB gain variation and < 0.9-dB NF variation from −40° to 85 °C. Based on the RX IC, a dual-polarized 1024-element RX antenna array is further introduced. The measured gain-to-noise temperature ratios (G/Ts) are 6.22 and 6.51 dB/K at 19.7 GHz for left- and right-hand circular polarizations, respectively.

I. Introduction

The large-scale millimeter-wave phased arrays based on silicon IC technologies enable electronically steerable antennas (ESAs) with reliable and high-speed connections and affordable cost for high-throughput and low Earth-orbit (LEO) broadband satellite communications (SATCOMs) [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17]. The -/-band SATCOM ground terminals use 17.7–20.2 and 27.5–30 GHz as the receiver (RX) and transmit (TX) bands. Owing to the long communication distance (i.e., about 500 km for LEO SATCOM and 36000 km for geosynchronous Earth-orbit SATCOM), the SATCOM ESA ground terminals usually require large-scale phased arrays.