A 43-97-GHz Mixer-First Front-End With Quadrature Input Matching and On-Chip Image Rejection

This article presents a wideband millimeter-wave (mmWave) receiver front-end that covers the frequency range from 43 to 97 GHz, supporting the operation in the major parts of the V-, E-, and W-bands. The front-end incorporates a passive mixer-first topology to achieve high linearity and wideband performance. The front-end adopts I/Q generation at the RF port, using a coupled-line coupler (CLC), rather than at the local oscillator (LO) port to mitigate the crosstalk of the overlapping I/Q LO signals especially present at high frequencies. The CLC at the RF input facilitates ultrawide band input matching. The front-end implements the multi-gate gm3 cancellation technique at the IF amplifiers to preserve the linearity and provide gain at the IF section. Image rejection capabilities using a current mode transformer-based IF 90 degrees coupler are implemented on chip and demonstrated with measurements. The front-end prototype is fabricated on the GlobalFoundries 22-nm FD-SOI CMOS process and it demonstrates an ultra-wideband performance across the frequency range 43-97 GHz (2.25:1 bandwidth) with image rejection of up to 32 dB, IIP3 of 1.6-5.2 dBm, and gain of 15 dB. The implementation used is low-IF topology with 3.8-GHz IF frequency and 1-GHz bandwidth. Furthermore, the measurement results show that the front-end supports high-speed modulated signals of up to 6-Gbps 64QAM modulation data.

Automated summary

This article introduces a wideband millimeter-wave receiver front-end that covers the frequency range from 43 to 97 GHz, incorporating passive mixer-first topology and I/Q generation for high linearity and wideband performance. The front-end implements multi-gate gm3 cancellation at the IF amplifiers to preserve linearity and provide gain, while achieving image rejection capabilities for high-quality signal processing. The prototype demonstrates ultra-wideband performance across the frequency range with up to 32 dB image rejection, 1.6-5.2 dBm IIP3, and 15 dB gain, supporting high-speed modulated signals of up to 6 Gbps 64QAM modulation data.