A 144-element phased array transceiver is realized using a modular tiled approach that supports 802.11ad, MCS12 single carrier 16-quadratic-amplitude modulation (QAM) 4.6 Gbps, in the 60-GHz band. It consists of a system-on-a chip (SOC) (MAC/PHY/BB to IF) in 28-nm CMOS, and one IF-to-60-GHz transceiver master chip driving twelve 60-GHz phased array transceiver slave chips fabricated in a 40-nm CMOS. Using the master-slave configuration, the 60-GHz transceiver with 12 phase-controlled TX/RX slices is expanded to 144 phase-controlled slices. Each final TX/RX slice is then connected to two patch antennas on LTCC substrate. A tiled approach is used to create the 288 patch antenna array out of six identical tiles each with two slave 60-GHz transceivers connected to a 48-element antenna array. The single tile phased array with 48 antennas has a measured beam steering scan angle of 60 degrees in azimuth and 10 degrees in elevation. The full phased array transceiver with 288 antennas has a measured over the air (OTA) max effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) of 51 dBm at saturated power (PSAT), and EIRP of 44.8 dBm with -22 dB EVM for MCS12 (16QAM-4.6 Gbps) at broadside. It has an OTA measured sensitivity of -87.3 and -80.4 dBm for MCS9 (QPSK-2.5 Gbps) and MCS12, respectively, at broadside. A packet error rate of 10(-5) was measured for MCS9 and MCS12 with an OTA input power of -85 and -77.5 dBm, respectively, for the full phased array transceiver at broadside.

The 802.11ad standard (WiGig) provides throughput speeds of multi-Gb/s covering tens of meters and uses beamforming in the four 2GHz-wide channels in the 60gHz ISM band. Conventional backhaul solutions, on the other hand, are designed with high gain directional antennas with no electronic beam steering and have high cost for installation and alignment of antennas. This paper presents a full-featured 802.11ad chipset with 144-element phased array using a tiled approach and CMOS IPs developed for WiGig to address low-cost municipal WiFi, small-cell backhauling, and broadband to home covering the last mile. Designed with a link budget of 120dB+, the phased-array solution can be mounted on top of lamp posts and roof-top buildings covering a 200m LOS, and with tens of hops a range of 2km can be covered from a single point of fiber. Moreover, the steerable phased arrays enable dynamic routing optimization between hopping nodes in a mesh network.