Monostatic and Bistatic G-Band BiCMOS Radar Transceivers With On-Chip Antennas and Tunable TX-to-RX Leakage Cancellation Maciej Kucharski , Wael

Abstract

This article presents G-band monostatic and bistatic radar transceivers (TRX) incorporating on-chip antennas for short-range high-precision applications. The circuits were fab- ricated using a silicon–germanium (SiGe) BiCMOS technology offering heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs) with f T/fMAX of 300/500 GHz. The monostatic TRX implements a tunable leakage canceller (LC) for enhanced transmitter (TX)-to-receiver (RX) leakage compensation and hence improved detectability of weakly reflecting near targets. A standalone monostatic TRX characterized at on-wafer level achieves 4-dBm maximum out- put power ( P TX) and 19-dB peak conversion gain ( GRX)w i t h 3-dB bandwidths of 18 and 17 GHz for the TX and the RX, respectively. The bistatic version reaches PTX of 13 dBm and GRX of 24 dB expanding the 3-dB bandwidths to 32 and 34 GHz for the TX and RX, respectively. A double-folded dipole antenna providing 5-dBi gain at 170 GHz was implemented using localized backside etching (LBE) and integrated with the transceivers. A frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar demon- strator incorporating an external phase-locked loop (PLL) was built to evaluate both TRXs and tunable leakage cancellation feature available in the monostatic variant. The maximum equivalent isotropic radiated power (EIRP), including on-chip antennas, is 8 and 18 dBm for the monostatic and bistatic TRX, respectively. The radars support sweep bandwidth up to 20 GHz reaching 2.1 cm spatial resolution. For a t