Boce Lin

This article presents a V-/E-band broadband low-noise amplifier (LNA) implemented in 22-nm CMOS fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FDSOI) technology, covering a 3-dB bandwidth from 60.6 to 74.4 GHz. The LNA achieves a measured average noise figure (NF) of 3.23 dB across 3-dB bandwidth, with a minimum NF of 2.32 dB at 65 GHz. A novel joint-feeding gate/source architecture based on a three-line coupler enables simultaneous noise and power matching (SNPM) and transconductance ( $\boldsymbol {g}_{\boldsymbol {m}}$ ) boosting, overcoming limitations of the conventional common-gate (CG) amplifier. The proposed LNA occupies a compact area, consumes moderate power, and achieves state-of-the-art noise performance, making it well suited for millimeter-wave (mmWave) backhaul and fixed wireless access in next generation communication.

This work presents a 120-GHz $4 \times 4$ active reconfigurable reflective relay array that can enable D-band non-line-of-sight (NLOS) wireless communication links in scenarios with heavily blocked line-of-sight (LOS) paths. The relay array employs orthogonally linear-polarized on-chip $4 \times 4$ transmitting/receiving antenna arrays, and is 2-D scalable on a $\lambda $ / $\times \lambda $ /2 grid. In addition, mixed-signal and low-latency loops are integrated within the front ends of the relay’s channels to detect the angle-of-arrival (AoA) of the external incident beam in both 2-D azimuth/elevation planes. These detection loops operate on the fly, at the carrier frequency, without the need of down-conversion, which avoids lossy mixers, complex local-oscillator (LO) distributions, and additional signal delays, ensuring a low-complexity and a high-scalability relay array design. The relay array operation is analyzed in the presence of non-idealities, including the finite isolation between the transmitting/receiving antennas and the channels’ mismatches. The $4 \times 4$ reflective relay array is implemented in GlobalFoundaries 22-nm CMOS fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) technology with a total area of $5\times 5$ mm. Each channel achieves a measured average gain of 23.6 dB with a 3-dB bandwidth from 110 to 125 GHz, while offering a 360° reconfigurable phase range with a step of 11.25°. Without any prior knowledge of the AoA of the external incident beam, over-the-air (OTA) measurement results demonstrate successful 120-GHz 1.3-m NLOS wireless links through the relay array achieving 64-QAM 2.4, 4.8, and 6 Gb/s with corresponding EVM_rms of 3.4%, 4.6%, and 5%, respectively.

A D -band swing-boosting CMOS power detector (PD) is proposed and implemented in 22-nm CMOS FDSOI technology. Using transistor parasitics and an added source inductor, the proposed design can achieve 6.5 times swing boosting compared to the traditional PD designs. The measured responsivity and noise equivalent power (NEP) is 25 KV/W and 2.1 pW/Hz $^{0.5}$ , $^{^{^{^{}}}}$ respectively. Compared to the state of the art, the proposed PD provides the highest responsivity for CMOS PD at the D -band.

Millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) receiver (RX) array systems are widely employed to address a plethora of applications for telecommunication, radar sensing, localization, imaging, and weather monitoring. Many future mm-Wave arrays need to operate in increasingly dynamic and mobile scenarios with complicated electromagnetic (EM) environments. With their wide deployment, they are more likely to be exposed to strong interferences with unknown angle-of-arrival (AoA), frequency, and modulation schemes. In this work, we propose and implement a 23–37-GHz autonomous 2-D multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) RX array system with rapid full field-of-view (FoV) spatial filtering and beamforming to manage interferences and signals from unknown direction-of-arrival (DoA). The implemented RX array system architecture provides multiple deep spatial notches to relax the dynamic range requirement of downstream analog-to-digital converter (ADC) circuits and is also extendable to a larger 2-D array. The implemented RX array system includes a broadband mm-Wave frontend and two autonomous spatial filter stages (ASFs) in cascade without losing MIMO capability. A prototype is demonstrated in a 45-nm RF CMOS silicon on insulator (SOI) process. The broadband mm-Wave frontend achieves $S_{11}$ $<$ $-$ 10 dB from 26 to 36 GHz with 23–37-GHz 3-dB bandwidth and 4.9-dB minimum noise figure (NF) within the operating band. Our autonomous MIMO array demonstrates $>-$ 2.4 dB normalized array factor over full FoV and spatial notch with $>$ 27.1 dB cancellation. With two ASFs stages in cascade, we demonstrate two individual spatial notches, each with $>$ 28.3 dB spatial cancellation on unknown blockers. Furthermore, co-channel wideband modulated blockers are autonomously rejected, and the desired signal is successfully demodulated for 2.4-Gb/s 64 QAM (highest speed) with $-$ 22.02-dB error vector magnitude (EVM) rms (25% interference/signal co-channel overlap), for 0.6-Gb/s 64 QAM with $-$ 26.32-dB EVMrms (50% co-channel overlap) and for 1.2-Gb/s 64 QAM with $-$ 26.16-dB EVMrms (25% co-channel overlap).

This work proposes a wideband 26–33 GHz multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) receiver (RX) array that leverages time-modulation operation to achieve concurrent steerable multibeam MIMOs (MB-MIMOs) using only one single array beamformer. Time-modulated arrays (TMAs) introduce time as an additional degree of freedom to concurrently sample and multiplex multiple received signals in various incident angles. In other words, time modulation on the RX array enables spatial-spectral mapping that maps received information in different directions to different frequency components in received spectrum with crossbeam isolation, which can be de-modulated by downstream circuits. Thus, the proposed TM MB-MIMO RX array supports concurrent space division multiple access (SDMA) communication with only one beamformer. Furthermore, with built-in phase shifters, the TM MB-MIMO RX also achieves fast-beam scanning with low hardware complexity. A proof-of-concept 26–33 GHz TM MB-MIMO RX array is implemented in the GlobalFoundries 45 nm CMOS RF silicon on insulator (SOI). The demonstrated RX element shows $S_{11}$ $<$ $-$ 10 dB across 24–32 GHz, and its maximum conversion gain (CG) is 28 dB with a 3 dB bandwidth of 26–33 GHz. The measured noise figure (NF) is 5.78 dB at 28 GHz with RX input-referred IP $_{\mathrm{1\,dB}}$ of $-$ 38 dBm. The proposed RX supports wideband-16/64 QAM single carrier modulations with maximum modulation speeds of 2.4/4.2 Gb/s, respectively. The demonstrated MB-MIMO RX array achieves five concurrent beams with good crossbeam isolation using only four-element and one analog beamformer and supports wideband-16/64 QAM single carrier modulations on each beam.

This work presents A 26-32 GHz dual-polarization receiver (RX) with a novel autonomous polarization alignment technique in the frontend. The system employs a mm-Wave dualpolarization RX front-end with an IF analog/mixed-signal computation unit to achieve fast dual-polarization misalignment correction with no digital backend computation for mobile, dynamic, and ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC). It is implemented in GlobalFoundries 45RFSOI CMOS process occupying 5.67mm2 total area. It has a wideband S11 response from 25.5 GHz to 34.5 GHz and achieves an ultra-rapid μ-second polarization mismatch correction time. Polarization leakage suppression of up to 35dB is measured with the receiver gain of 28 dB and NF of 5.8 dB.