See also: Our roundup of the latest news from the IEEE ISSCC (International Solid State Circuits Conference), San Francisco
Belgian lab IMEC has developed a 60GHz front-end receive chain, phase-locked loop and power amplifier in 45nm digital CMOS.
"These building blocks pave the way to second-generation 60GHz radios by 2010 which will rely solely on plain CMOS: true one-chip solutions," said IMEC.
The digitally controlled 57-66GHz receiver occupies 150x150µm2 and consumes 19mA at 1.1V. "Full digital control makes it highly suitable for phased-array systems," claimed the lab.
The phase-locked loop covers the same frequency range and, according to IMEC, outperforms all previous designs in terms of tuning range.
"It is the first to provide quadrature output phases at mm-wave frequencies, such that it can be readily used in a zero-IF architecture," said the lab.
The circuit consumes 78mW at 1.1V.
With the receiver and PLL "we can realise uncompressed high definition video distribution with 16 antenna paths over 10 meter range with a power consumption of only 1.6W for the complete receiver", said Rudy Lauwereins, v-p smart systems technology office at IMEC.
There is also a mm-wave power amplifier in 45nm digital CMOS, the first of its kind said IMEC. The push-pull circuit features a 1dB compression point of 11dBm between 50 and 67GHz at 1.1V supply voltage.
To go with the 60GHz CMOS, IMEC has developed PCB-based antennas and antenna interfaces, and made a module.
"The performance of this module has been demonstrated in a wireless setup validating IMEC's baseband processing algorithms for IEEE15.3c compliant reception," said the lab which used it to demonstrated multi-Gbit/s communication.
Results were published this week at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.
