Measurement of complex transfer function of analog transmit-receive frontends for terahertz wireless communications

This paper proposes a reliable method of characterizing the scattering parameters of radio links operating at terahertz frequencies. The complex transfer characteristics and the non-idealities of analog transmit-receive frontends with quadrature baseband channels can be evaluated. Two coherent channels of an arbitrary waveform generator, combined with filters and a frequency multiplier chain are employed to generate the phase-adjustable local oscillator tones for the quadrature up- and down-converter. Impairments like quadrature gain and phase imbalance, port matching and group delay variation give valuable information about the performance of the terahertz wireless link. A proof-of-concept experiment is realized using a 300 GHz MMIC-based wireless link with an overall system bandwidth of 38 GHz. Accurate gain-frequency and phase-frequency measurements are demonstrated.

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