A 14-nm Low-Cost IF Transceiver IC with Low-Jitter LO and Flexible Calibration Architecture for 5G FR2 Mobile Applications

We present a low-cost dual-stream IF transceiver IC (IFIC) for 5G mm-wave mobile applications. It up/down-converts the baseband signal to an intermediate frequency of 8.4-10 GHz and forms a heterodyne transceiver system together with beamforming ICs to support all FR2 bands. The IFIC features a compact transceiver RF circuitry, low-jitter reconfigurable LO suitable for 256-QAM and non-contiguous carrier aggregation, and an integrated MCU in the digital baseband for flexible calibration and control of both transceiver ICs. The IFIC is implemented in 14-nm FinFET and occupies 16.2 mm(2). The overall chain IPN measured at 39-GHz band is as low as 114 fs. Thanks to the flexible calibration architecture, digital-pre-distortion (DPD) is demonstrated in TX, which allows for >1 dB of increase in EIRP for both DFT-s- and CP-OFDM signals at EVM of 5.5% at 39-GHz band.