A 22-31 GHz Bidirectional 5G Transceiver Front-End in 28 nm CMOS

A bidirectional transceiver front-end in 28 nm bulk CMOS is presented. A transformer-based T/R switch is used to minimize the area occupation without reducing the linearity and the isolation between the transmitter and receiver paths. The transmitter shows a power gain of 19 dB and an output-referred P-1dB of 14 dBm. At the 1 dB compression point the PAE is 18.7%. With a 100 MHz 64-QAM OFDM modulated input signal, the EVM is below 5% up to an average output power of 6.6 dBm, with a corresponding PAE of 7%. The receiver has a minimum NF of 4.9 dB, a voltage gain of 17 dB and an 11P3 of -9.2 dBm, while consuming 35 mW. Both TX and RX feature a very wide passband from 22 GHz to 31 GHz.