9.5 An 80Gb/s 300GHz-Band Single-Chip CMOS Transceiver

IEEE Standard 802.15.3d, published in October 2017, defines a high-data-rate wireless physical layer that enables up to 100Gb/s using the lower THz frequency range between 252 and 325GHz (hereafter referred to as the “300GHz band”). It stipulates that the 300GHz band be channelized into thirty-two 2.16GHz-wide channels (Fig. 9.5.1) or a smaller number of wider channels whose bandwidths are all integer multiples of 2.16GHz. This paper presents a CMOS transceiver (TRX) chip targeted at channels 49 through 51 and 66 of 802.15.3d (Fig. 9.5.1). The TRX was fabricated using a 40nm CMOS process. There have been reports on solid-state transceivers (TRXs) operating in or near the 300GHz band [1]–[6]. Some of these [1]–[3] were TX/RX or block-level chipsets, which can enjoy more flexibility in design and independent optimization of TX and RX. They successfully achieved $\geq 64$ Gb/s. On the other hand, single-chip TRXs [4]–[6] did not always reveal achievable data-rates nor were capable of supporting quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). Nevertheless, eventual development of full-featured single-chip TRXs is desirable especially for applications requiring deployment of many TRXs, as is envisioned implicitly by 802.15.3d. The single-chip QAM-capable CMOS TRX presented herein is an outcome of efforts in that direction.