A 60-GHz 8-Way Phased-Array Front-End With T/R Switching and Calibration-Free Beamsteering in 28-nm CMOS

An eight-way phased-array TRX front-end with RF phase shifting and on-chip transmit/receive switching is implemented in 28-nm CMOS. The TX <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P_{\mathbf {1dBout}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and RX noise figure (NF) are 10 dBm and 6.8 dB, respectively. The active phase shifter shows less than 5° phase resolution and amplitude errors within ± 0.35 dB. The 9.6-mm<sup>2</sup>chip consumes 231 mW in RX and 508 mW in the TX mode from a 0.9-V supply. When combined with PCB antennas, a ±46° scan angle is obtained with <0.4 dB peak-to-peak gain ripples without calibration. We also present an approach to express the noise performance of a phased-array receiver in terms of the effective isotropic NF, as an extension to the NF, which is only defined for a two-port system.

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