This book discusses low power techniques for millimeter wave transmitter IC. Considerations for the front-end design are followed by several implementation examples in the 60GHz band in CMOS down to 28nm technology. Additionally, the design and implementation details of digitally-modulated millimeter wave polar transmitters are presented.

This book presents design methods and considerations for digitally-assisted wideband millimeter-wave transmitters. It addresses comprehensively both RF design and digital implementation simultaneously, in order to design energy- and cost-efficient high-performance transmitters for mm-wave high-speed communications. It covers the complete design flow, from link budget assessment to the transistor-level design of different RF front-end blocks, such as mixers and power amplifiers, presenting different alternatives and discussing the existing trade-offs. The authors also analyze the effect of the imperfections of these blocks in the overall performance, while describing techniques to correct and compensate for them digitally. Well-known techniques are revisited, and some new ones are described, giving examples of their applications and proving them in real integrated circuits.

In the quest to increase channel bandwidths in wireless communication systems, two important trends are to move towards wider continuous bands at mm-wave frequencies and to aggregate smaller bands at cellular frequencies. In this dissertation a few of the challenges and possible circuit and DSP solutions for efficient high data rate communication using these techniques are described. First, an issue relating to cellular uplink carrier aggregation is discussed and a DSP based solution developed. Second, the design of a broad band CMOS PA for mm-wave applications is presented. Third, the design of an mm-wave predistortion system and its use to predistort an array of mm-wave CMOS SOI PAs is described. In the near term, cellular carriers plan on employing carrier aggregation to increase data rates. This can lead to significant receiver desensitization for a number of LTE band combinations, because of the cross-modulation products created by the nonlinearity of RF front-end components. To mitigate this effect, an all-digital cancellation algorithm is proposed in this thesis that canceled the cross-modulation product and improved the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and error-vector-magnitude (EVM) of the desired received signal by up to 20 dB. In the second part of the dissertation, the possibility of using mm-wave CMOS PAs for wideband communication is described. The design of CMOS stacked-FET PAs with an emphasis on appropriate complex impedances between the transistors is presented. The stacking of multiple FETs enables the use of higher supply voltages, which in turn allows higher output power and a broader bandwidth output matching network. A 4-stack amplifier design that achieves a saturated output power greater than 21 dBm while achieving a maximum power-added-efficiency (PAE) greater than 20% from 38 GHz to 47 GHz is reported. Finally, the thesis describes predistortion of an array of stacked-FET PAs after spatial power combining. Predistortion improved the signal quality to a high level, which allowed the use of complex modulation schemes, which in turn allows high data rates in a spectrally efficient manner. After predistortion a 100-MHz wide, 1024-QAM signal was demodulated with an EVM of 1.3%, which corresponds to a data rate of 1 Gb/s.

The aim of this book is to present the modern design and analysis principles of millimeter-wave communication system for wireless devices and to give postgraduates and system professionals the design insights and challenges when integrating millimeter wave personal communication system. Millimeter wave communication system are going to play key roles in modern gigabit wireless communication area as millimeter-wave industrial standards from IEEE, European Computer Manufacturing Association (ECMA) and Wireless High Definition (Wireless HD) Group, are on their way to the market. The book will review up-to-date research results and utilize numerous design and analysis for the whole system covering from Millimeter wave frontend to digital signal processing in order to address major topics in a high speed wireless system. This book emphasizes the importance and the requirements of high-gain antennas, low power transceiver, adaptive equalizer/modulation, channeling coding and adaptive multi-user detection for gigabit wireless communications. In addition, the book will include the updated research literature and patents in the topics of transceivers, antennas, MIMO, channel capacity, coding, equalizer, Modem and multi-user detection. Finally the application of these antennas will be discussed in light of different forthcoming wireless standards at V-band and E-band.

The rapid growth data streaming demand in modern communication systems makes unprecedented challenges for wireless service providers. Along with the growth data streaming demand, the steady development of wireless application causes an issue of wireless coexistence with limited frequency spectrum. Therefore, the energy and spectrum efficient transmitters with higher data rate, small die area, and low integration cost are demanded for the modern communication systems.The fifth generation mobile network emerges as a promising revolution in mobile communications with higher data rates. In 5G mobile network, two kind of frequency bands, sub-6 GHz bands and millimeter-wave bands above 24 GHz, are classified. Due to the densely packed spectrum in sub-6 GHz bands, the transmitter designs have focused on improving spectral efficiency with frequency-localized waveforms such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing. However, the OFDM signal has a major drawback of high peak-to-average-ratio, which results in degraded power efficiency of the transmitter. On the other hand, to support higher data rate, mm-wave bands can support bandwidths up to 2 GHz without aggregating bands together. However, at mm-wave bands, the maximum range to sustain reliable wireless links is decreased due the increasing pass loss. Fortunately, the phased array techniques, which have been used for defense and satellite applications for many years, enables the directive communications could be a promising solution to overcome the challenges.The objective of this dissertation is to present novel topologies for transmitter designs, which are suitable for modern communication systems in both sub-6 GHz and mm-wave bands. For sub-6 GHz bands, an efficient quadrature digital power amplifier as a standalone transmitter has been proposed. The proposed transmitter employs complex-domain Doherty and dual-supply Class-G to achieve up to four efficiency peaks and excellent system efficiency at power back-off. For mm-wave bands, an 18-50-GHz mm-wave transmitter has been proposed. The proposed mm-wave transmitter is designed for low power consumption, a small area, and supports emerging multibeam communications and directional sensing with an increased number of phased array elements from 18-50 GHz.

Increasing the carrier frequency is one of the most promising solutions to deliver gigabit data rates in wireless communication systems. Applications like kiosk downloading or wireless high definition video transmission will certainly demand up to 10 Gbps in a few years. As these are highly consumer oriented applications, a low-cost implementation of the system is mandatory, which can be achieved by using planar structures with standard fabrication processes. This research focuses on exploring the relevant technologies for this next generation of millimeter-wave systems capable of multi-gigabit data rates. In millimeter-waves, interconnections play a key role: they are needed in antenna characterization and connection and system integration. Therefore, current and new interconnection structures for millimeter-waves are investigated. In particular, an efficient D band waveguide to microstrip transition for antenna measurement or interconnection is developed. An electromagnetic theory explaining its coupling mechanism is also presented. For multi-gigabit applications, very broad bandwidth antennas are needed. A planar antipodal dipole antenna for 122 GHz which features such broad bandwidth is discussed. Moreover, it was designed to be relatively insensitive to fabrication innacuracies. A transmission line model for the antenna is also presented. Several other antenna structures with different radiation patterns for a variety of applications are also addressed. It is clear from the power budget of a millimeter-wave system that moderate high gain antennas will be needed. Therefore, array structures for current "hot" applications are sketched. Focusing on a particular application, the high definition video transmission, the Quality of Service problem is addressed. This problem comes with the fact that the direct signal path might be temporarily blocked in a regular home environment. To overcome the problem, beamforming with a Rotman lens is proposed. Several antenna demonstrators for this application at 60 GHz were built. In order to correctly measure the antenna structures, a millimeter-wave antenna measurement setup was developed. It is highly flexible and delivers accurate and repeatable results. The system is useful for the measurement of antenna structures at D or V band. Finally, a whole end-to-end millimeter-wave system is discussed by the construction of a full demonstrator for 60 GHz with Quality of Service. The front end consists of transmitter and receiver and is built using off the shelf components. It is fully configurable and adaptable for the utilization of different antennas and beamforming devices, which can be very useful for channel measurement operations.

The Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been proposed as an enabling methodology to integrate many embedded cores on a single die. The existing method of implementing a NoC with planar metal interconnects is deficient due to high latency and significant power consumption arising from multi-hop links used in data exchanges. The millimeter (mm)-wave wireless NoC (WiNoC) is envisioned as a potential solution to these bottlenecks by replacing multi-hop wired paths with high-bandwidth, single-hop, long-range wireless links in mm-wave frequency. The WiNoC architecture necessitates a highly efficient wireless transceiver that can communicate at a data rate of tens of Gb/s.