A 28-/60-GHz Dual-Band Receiver Front-End With Sideband-Selection Technique in 65-nm CMOS

This article presents a dual-band receiver front-end based on a reconfigurable Hartley architecture with double frequency conversion for millimeter-wave wireless communication. By controlling working states of band-select switches, the receiver is able to reach different RF bands without increasing or altering local-oscillator (LO) and intermediate-frequency bands. To reduce power consumption and save chip area, RF quadrature mixers are co-designed with the last stage of a dual-band low-noise amplifier and reuse its dc current. In addition, a self-mixing frequency tripler with a transformer-based compact hybrid is developed to multiply an input LO and provide quadrature LO signals for the RF mixers. The prototype receiver is demonstrated in a 65 nm CMOS process. Measurement results show that the receiver successfully covers two frequency bands of 24.6~28 GHz and 55.6~60 GHz, and the corresponding peak conversion gains are up to 24.5 dB and 26.3 dB, respectively. In these two bands, the minimum single-sideband noise figures are 7.5 and 7.8 dB. The tested image-rejection ratio of the dual-band receiver is better than 30 dB in both 26.5~30.0 GHz and 57.5~60.5 GHz bands. Besides, the receiver also demonstrates its capability of supporting up to 256QAM modulation and 3.2-Gb/s data-rate transmission.

I. Introduction

The rapidly increasing demand for high-data-rate wireless communication has motivated research of millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) circuits and transceivers [1]. In recent years, 28-GHz band (n257, n258, n261) has been licensed by 3GPP as an extension of the sub-6 GHz frequency range for the fifth-generation (5G) wireless communication [2]. Besides, V band also has been promoted for IEEE 802.11ad/WiGig very-high-throughput (VHT) wireless local area networks (WLANs) [3]. To be compatible with different standards and lower the cost of wireless system deployment, mm-Wave transceiver front-ends which can support multiple bands have attracted tremendous attention from academic and industrial fields [4], [5], [6], [7], [8].