A Broadband 22-31-GHz Bidirectional Image-Reject Up/Down Converter Module in 28-nm CMOS for 5G Communications

This article presents a Ka -band bidirectional transceiver front end and its integration in an image-reject up/down converter module in 28-nm bulk CMOS. In the radio frequency (RF) front end, a transformer-based transmit/receive (T/R) switch is exploited for minimum area occupation without affecting the linearity and the isolation between the transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) paths. The TX front end shows 19-dB power gain with an output-referred {\mathrm{ OP}}_{\mathrm{ 1\,dB}} of 14 dBm and 18.7% power-added efficiency (PAE). Tested with a 100-MHz 64-QAM orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulated input signal, the error vector magnitude (EVM) is below 5% up to an average output power of 6.6 dBm, with a corresponding 7% PAE. The RX in the front end features a minimum noise figure (NF) of 4.9 dB, with 17-dB power gain. The measured input IP3 is -9.2 dBm, while the power consumption is only 35 mW. The RF bandwidth is 22-31 GHz, wide enough to cover the fifth-generation ...