A 64QAM 94GHz CMOS transmitter SoC with digitally-assisted power amplifiers and thru-silicon waveguide power combiners

Author

LaRocca, T. ; Yi-Cheng Wu ; Thai, Khanh ; Snyder, R. ; Daftari, Naveen ; Fordham, Owen ; Rodgers, Peter ; Watanabe, Manabu ; Yang, Yi ; Ardakani, Masoud ; Namoos, Waleed ; Poust, Sumiko ; Chang, Mau-Chung Frank

Author_Institution

Northrop Grumman Aerosp. Syst., Redondo Beach, CA, USA

fYear

2014

fDate

1-3 June 2014

Firstpage

295

Lastpage

298

Abstract

A 94GHz 64QAM 1Gbps reconfigurable system-on-chip (SoC) CMOS transmitter with digitally-assisted power amplifiers (DAPA) and back-etched thru silicon waveguide power combiners is presented. The SoC includes a 7M gate ASIC with reconfigurable digital modulation and transmit pre-coding. The ASIC feeds two 10b 1.4GHz current-steering DACs followed by a direct conversion IQ modulator driving eight DAPAs. A 64QAM signal achieves 3.9% EVM with 50dBc ACPR at 94GHz. The data rate is 1.05Gbps and the output power exceeds 10dBm. DC power is 2.1W. The SoC uses IBM 12SOI CMOS.

Keywords

CMOS analogue integrated circuits; MMIC power amplifiers; elemental semiconductors; etching; modulation coding; modulators; power combiners; precoding; quadrature amplitude modulation; radio transmitters; silicon; silicon-on-insulator; system-on-chip; 64QAM CMOS transmitter SoC; 7M gate ASIC; DAPA; IBM 12SOI CMOS; Si; back-etched thru silicon waveguide power combiner; bit rate 1 Gbit/s; bit rate 1.05 Gbit/s; current-steering DAC; digitally-assisted power amplifier; direct conversion IQ modulator; frequency 1.4 GHz; frequency 94 GHz; power 2.1 W; precoding transmission; reconfigurable digital modulation; storage capacity 10 bit; system-on-chip; CMOS integrated circuits; Computer architecture; Modulation; Power amplifiers; Power combiners; System-on-chip; CMOS technology; Power amplifier; Quadrature amplitude modulation; System-on-a-chip;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium, 2014 IEEE

Conference_Location

Tampa, FL

ISSN

1529-2517

Print_ISBN

978-1-4799-3862-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/RFIC.2014.6851724

Filename

6851724