A 60GHz Outphasing Transmitter in 40nm CMOS with 15.6dBm Output Power

📋 论文概要

本文提出了一种60GHz CMOS outphasing发射机，采用40nm工艺实现15.6dBm输出功率，旨在解决60GHz发射机在传输幅度和相位调制信号时平均效率低的问题。通过outphasing架构，改善了功率回退时的效率。

💡 主要创新点

• 采用outphasing架构替代传统线性功率放大器，在回退条件下保持较高效率。
• 在40nm CMOS工艺上实现了60GHz频段的15.6dBm输出功率，并验证了发射机性能。

🏷 关键词

📄 原文摘要

One of the important technical problems related to 60GHz CMOS transmitters is the poor average efficiency when transmitting amplitude- and phase-modulated signals. The cause of this low efficiency is the required back-off from the output 1dB compression point (P1dB) to meet EVM and transmit spectrum mask specifications. A conventional power amplifier (PA) only provides maximum efficiency near the saturated output power (PSAT). For a 6dB back-off from P1dB, the output power and PAE of the state-of-the-art PAs remain below 9dBm and 5%, respectively [1,2]. This paper presents a 60GHz transmitter (TX) based on the outphasing technique [3]. It avoids amplifying variable-envelope signals and reconstructs the modulated signals by vector summing two constant-amplitude phase-modulated signals using an on-chip power combiner. The proposed design proves to have higher linear output power with better average efficiency compared to existing 60GHz solutions.

👥 作者与机构

Dixian Zhao, Shailesh Kulkarni, Patrick Reynaert

K.U. Leuven, Leuven, Belgium