A Broadband 22–31-GHz Bidirectional Image-Reject Up/Down Converter Module in 28-nm CMOS for 5G Communications

This article presents a $Ka$ -band bidirectional transceiver front end and its integration in an image-reject up/down converter module in 28-nm bulk CMOS. In the radio frequency (RF) front end, a transformer-based transmit/receive (T/R) switch is exploited for minimum area occupation without affecting the linearity and the isolation between the transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) paths. The TX front end shows 19-dB power gain with an output-referred ${\mathrm{ OP}}_{\mathrm{ 1\,dB}}$ of 14 dBm and 18.7% power-added efficiency (PAE). Tested with a 100-MHz 64-QAM orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulated input signal, the error vector magnitude (EVM) is below 5% up to an average output power of 6.6 dBm, with a corresponding 7% PAE. The RX in the front end features a minimum noise figure (NF) of 4.9 dB, with 17-dB power gain. The measured input IP3 is –9.2 dBm, while the power consumption is only 35 mW. The RF bandwidth is 22–31 GHz, wide enough to cover the fifth-generation (5G) new radio (NR) bands n257, n258, and n261. The RF front end is also monolithically integrated along with a broadband bidirectional frequency up/down converter, capable of translating the 5G modulated signal from/to a 3-GHz intermediate frequency (IF). The up/down converter is realized with a single bidirectional quadrature mixer shared between the TX and RX paths. At the IF, a single hybrid coupler is used for quadrature phase shifting in upconversion and recombination in downconversion while concurrently keeping the TX and RX IF paths isolated from each other. In the upconversion mode, the module features a 22-dB programmable conversion gain, with a 40-dB minimum in-band image rejection ratio (IRR). The downconversion path shows a 29-dB programmable conversion gain and a minimum measured NF and IRR of 8.5 and 30 dB, respectively, while consuming 110 mW.