A 250-mW 60-GHz CMOS Transceiver SoC Integrated With a Four-Element AiP Providing Broad Angular Link Coverage

In this article, we present a low-power, small form-factor, 60-GHz packaged radio featuring broad beam coverage. We increase angular coverage by beam switching between two orthogonally pointed low directivity beams that are created using two different antennas integrated in package. The resulting wide angular coverage of the radio makes radio links robust to movement and rotation; this improvement overcomes a key challenge for millimeter-wave (mmWave) deployment in portable electronics. We incorporate a 3.2 mm x 3.2 mm 32-nm CMOS radio integrated circuit (IC) in the package for radio functions. The IC includes TX and RX RF front ends, up- and down-conversion mixers, TX and RX analog baseband circuits, a common PLL, TX and RX LO chains, and ADCs and a micro-controller for built-in self-test (BIST). The IC is flip-chip packaged on a four-layer organic package comprising two TX antennas and two RX antennas. In board-level over-the-air measurements of the half-duplex packaged radio, 17.1-dBm effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) and 6.1-dB noise figure are achieved in the TX and RX modes respectively, with power consumption below 250 mW in either mode. We characterized the radio over the air using 802.11ad waveforms; the radio is 802.11ad compliant in both TX and RX modes at data rates up to the maximum 802.11ad PHY rate of 4.62 Gb/s (raw data rate >7 Gb/s) with a TX EVM < -22 dB and RX sensitivity < -54 dBm. To measure angular coverage, we characterized 802.11ad compliance in 3-D over 3 pi steradians in first-of-a-kind measurements. The radio maintains 802.11ad compliance over 2.9 pi steradians solid angle.