A Compact 76-81 GHz 3TX/4RX Transceiver for FMCW Radar Applications in 65-nm CMOS Technology

This paper presents a compact 76-81 GHz 3TX/4RX transceiver for FMCW radar applications in 65-nm CMOS technology. Three individual transmitters (TXs) and four receivers (RXs) are integrated for MIMO operation to achieve higher resolution and sensitivity. A wideband frequency sextupler cascaded with a Wilkinson power divider is employed as the local oscillation (LO) chain to lower down the frequency of FMCW signal generator and simplify the design of LO distribution network. Each transmitter channel achieves above 12.2 dBm output power from 76-81 GHz and a peak 14.2 dBm output power is obtained at 77 GHz. The receiver conversion gain from low noise amplifier input to baseband output is programmable from 46.3 dB to 102.45 dB for adapting to different detection distances. The measured noise figure of the receiver chain is 11 dB at 5 MHz intermediate frequency (IF). The transceiver including all dc bonding pads occupies a silicon area of 1.8 mm x 4 mm, and the power dissipation of the whole chip is 721.8 mW.