Feasibility study of the feed-forward carrier recovery technique for E-band integrated receivers

A feasibility study of a carrier recovery technique based on a feed-forward controlled leakage transmission carrier is presented. The study proposes a receiver topology and verifies its feasibility by means of the system-level simulations. The results of the study indicate that the proposed technique is theoretically modulation-independent and can be used with each modulation format. To demonstrate a practical feasibility, a BPSK receiver topology is proposed and based on it a demonstrator chip is implemented in a SiGe 0.13 μm heterojunction bipolar transistor technology. To reduce the complexity of the integrated receiver and to sustain low risks at the first production run, the receiver was implemented as all-resistive. The carrier recovery circuit on the chip comprises a static frequency divider and a K a -band phase-locked loop with quadrature outputs. A direct-conversion sub-harmonic mixer plays the role of a E-band demodulator. The proposed technique can be used in various high baud rate communication applications, saving on the computing power of the digital process.