A 61 GHz SiGe transmitter chip for energy and data transmission of passive RFID single chip tags with integrated antennas

This paper presents a SiGe transmitter chip for short-range devices in the 61 GHz ISM frequency band. The presented transmitter consists of a fundamental VCO, a PA, lumped element Wilkinson-Dividers and a static divide-by-16 chain for stabilization in a PLL. Two variants of the transmitter are fabricated with supply voltages of 3.3 V and 5 V in a modern 130nm SiGe BiCMOS technology with HBTs offering an ft of 250 GHz and fmax of 370 GHz. The main goal of this work is to achieve an efficient signal source to supply a passive RFID tag with the maximum allowed 20 dBm EIRP for short range devices. The transmitter chips achieve a peak output power of 17 dBm, PAEpa of 18.8% and DC-to-RF efficiency of 12.9% (excluding the divider). At 61 GHz a phase noise of -102 dBc/Hz is achieved. The power consumption for the chips are 710 mW and 482 mW for the 5 V and 3.3 V variant, respectively.