A 60GHz wideband low noise eight-element phased array RX front-end for beam steering communication applications in 45nm CMOS

This paper presents an 8-elements phased array receiver front-end in 45nm CMOS technology. The receiver uses a 4-bit resolution RF phase shifter to compensate for the free-space propagation delay and an active eight-to-one power combiner enabling beam-forming. Each path shows more than 15.8dB of power gain with <;0.5 dB of RMS gain variation for all 16 phase settings over the 3-dB gain bandwidth from 53.2GHz - 64.6GHz. The measured RMS phase error is <;5° over the same band, achieving greater than 4-bit accuracy. Within the 3-dB gain bandwidth, the single-path NF ranges from 4.3dB to 6.3dB. The total power consumption is 613mW and the overall chip size is 4.8×1.5mm².