A Wideband Millimeter-Wave Up-Conversion Mixer for Future Backhaul E-Band Point-to-Point Links with a 0dBm 1-dB Compression Point

This paper presents the design of an energy- efficient E-Band full-duplex transceiver for backhaul links of the future mobile networks. The link is designed to achieve 10Gbps using 2GHz channels and 64-QAM modulation. The effect of the transmitter linearity on the system performance is analyzed, showing that the required power back-off is around 10dB. A 15GHz mixer to be used in the I/Q upconverter of the transmitter is also presented, which is integrated in a SiGe 55nm process from STMicroeletronics. Measurement results show input and output bandwidths of 0-4GHz and 11.2-18GHz respectively, with a CG of 2.5dB, an OCP1dB of 0dBm and a DC power consumption of 68mW. The mixer features better linearity than other reported upconverters integrated in Si-based technologies.