Open AccessPower‐efficient full‐duplex K/Ka‐band phased array front‐end
Author(s) -
Tabarani Filipe,
Boccia Luigi,
Calzona Domenico,
Amendola Giandomenico,
Schumacher Hermann
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
iet microwaves, antennas and propagation
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.555
H-Index - 69
eISSN - 1751-8733
pISSN - 1751-8725
DOI - 10.1049/iet-map.2019.0447
Subject(s) - electrical engineering , amplifier , ka band , phased array , engineering , physics , electronic engineering , cmos , antenna (radio)
This study presents the first monolithically integrated full‐duplex front‐end for K/Ka satellite communication phased arrays. A 0.25 μm SiGe:C BiCMOS process was used to develop the integrated circuit. The receive and transmit channels are united into a common port through a novel duplexer. For each RF channel, the bias currents, the active channels and the power amplifier operation mode can be controlled through a serial bus. Amplitude and phase control are provided with fine granularity (65,536 states). In transmit mode, each channel provides 37.3 dB of gain with 12.9 dBm output power at 1‐dB compression. In receive mode, 33.7 dB gain is measured with a noise figure of 3.2 dB. The amplitude/phase root‐mean‐square errors within the transmit (29.5–30.8 GHz) and receive (19.7–21 GHz) bands are below 0.7 dB/ 6.4 ° and 0.26 dB/ 1.1 ° , respectively. The chip occupies 1.64 × 3.5mm 2 and it consumes 81 and 15.5 mW per transmit and receive channels, respectively. The use of a Doherty power amplifier with a novel dynamic adaptive bias circuit led to a 31% reduction of the total dc array power consumption.