High-performance 60 GHz MMICs for wireless digital communication in 100 nm mHEMT technology

Wireless data communication is pushing towards 60 GHz and will most likely be served by SiGe and Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technologies in the consumer market. Nevertheless, some applications are imposing superior performance requirements on the analog frontend, and employing III-V compound semiconductors can provide significant advantages with respect to transmitter power and noise figure. In this paper, we present essential building blocks and a novel single-chip low complexity transceiver Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit (MMIC) with integrated antenna switches for 60 GHz communication, fabricated in a 100 nm metamorphic high electron mobility transistor (mHEMT) technology. This technology features a measured noise figure of ,2.5 dB in low-noise amplifiers at 60 GHz and the realized medium power amplifiers achieve more than 20 dBm saturated output power. Integrated antenna switches with an insertion loss of less than 1.5 dB enable the integration of the transmit and the receive stages on a single chip. A single-chip transceiver with external subharmonic Local Oscillator (LO) supply for its I/Q down- and up-converter achieves a linear conversion gain in both, the Transmit (Tx) and the Receive (Rx) paths, of more than 10 dB.