CMOS Phased Array Transceiver Technology for 60 GHz Wireless Applications

Based on the indoor radio-wave propagation analysis, and the fundamental limits of CMOS technology it is shown that phased array technology is the ultimate solution for the radio and physical layer of the millimeter wave multi-Gb/s wireless networks. A low-cost, single-receiver array architecture with RF phase-shifting is proposed and design, analysis and measurements of its key components are presented. A high-gain, two-stage, low noise amplifier in 90 nm-CMOS technology with more than 20 dB gain over the 60 GHz spectrum is designed. Furthermore, a broadband analog phase shifter with a linear phase and low insertion loss variation is designed, and its measured characteristics are presented. Moreover, two novel beamforming techniques for millimeter wave phased array receivers are developed in this paper. The performance of these methods for line-of-sight and multipath signal propagation conditions is studied. It is shown that one of the proposed beamforming methods has an excess gain of up to 14 dB when the line of sight link is obstructed by a human.