A 70-Mb/s 100.5-dBm Sensitivity 65-nm LP MIMO Chipset for WiMAX

Abstract

In this paper, we present a low-power high-per- formance WiMAX chipset fully compliant with IEEE 802.16e specification corrigendum 1, 2 for mobile broadband access and WiMAX Forum system pro file Wave2. The chip set is com- prised of a 632.7-mW/24.99-mm modem/router chip and a 364-mW/11.05-mm dual-band 2 2 MIMO RF transceiver chip, both developed in 65-nm CMOS process. The proposed chipset is capable of handling a maximum peak WiMAX downlink (DL) throughput of 70 Mbps. Moreover, the chipset can reach up to 100.5-dBm sensitivity in a 10-MHz A WGN channel, which outperforms WiMAX Forum mob ile radio conformance test (MRCT) by 9.5 dB. Such high sensitivity is due to the proposed low-noise high-linearity RF tra nsceiver chip, which has 2.5-dB RX noise figure (NF) and 37-dB TX error vector magnitude (EVM), and the applied high-performance baseband signal processing algorithms. Several low-po wer design techniques—from SW level, firmware/DSP level, to HW module level—have been implemented to enable portable applications. The modem/router chip is highly integrated and has rich fe atures and various interfaces for appli- cations such as router or VoIP phone. Furthermore, this is the only published WiMAX chipset which has been in mass production.