A 28-GHz Phased-Array Transceiver with Series-Fed Dual-Vector Distributed Beamforming

This paper presents a 28-GHz four-element phased-array transceiver in 130-nm SiGe BiCMOS technology for 5G cellular application. The array employs scalar-only weighting functions within each front-end and a global quadrature function, enabling small footprint for each element. A dual-vector series feed network also reduces size of the array. Measurements show that each receive front-end achieves 8.7 to 11.5 dB gain, 4.5 to 6.9 dB noise figure, -25.4 to -18.4 dBm input 1-dB compression point, and < 0.5dB/2.1 degrees RMS gain/phase error at 24 to 28 GHz. Each transmit front-end achieves 9.4 to 14.3 dB gain, 5.5 to 10.6 dBm output 1-dB compression point, and < 0.4dB/4.2 degrees RMS gain/phase error at 24 to 28 GHz. The four-element transceiver array occupies 2.9 mm(2) area and consumes 1.08 W in transmit mode and 0.68 W in receive mode.