An Eight-Channel 15–55 GHz Dual-Beam Receive Phased-Array Beamformer IC With 2.9–4.2 dB NF for Multiband 5G Operation

Abstract

This article presents a 15–55-GHz multiband dual-beam receive phased-array to cover the fifth-generation (5G) new radio (NR) frequency range 2 (FR2) bands. The phased array is based on an eight-channel ( $4 \times $ ) dual-beam receive beamformer chip which is designed in a SiGe BiCMOS process. The chip adopts RF beamforming with differential RF inputs to interface with wideband differential Vivaldi antennas. Each channel pair consists of a low noise amplifier (LNA) that splits the power between two channels each with a phase shifter (PS), a variable gain amplifier (VGA), and a differential-to-single-ended stage (D2S). Two 4:1 Wilkinson (WK) combining networks are used to combine the outputs of the eight channels into two independent RF outputs. The beamformer chip results in an electronic gain of 24–30 dB with 2.9–4.2-dB noise figure (NF) and $- 31~\pm ~3$ dBm input power 1-dB compression point (IP1dB) at 15–50 GHz and consumes 185 mW/channel. A 16-element phased array module is built on a printed circuit board (PCB) using beamformer chips and scans up to ±60° with side lobes below -11 dB across multiple 5G FR2 bands. A wireless link is demonstrated with 12-Gb/s data rates using 64-QAM single carrier signals and <2.62% error vector magnitude (EVM) with 400-MHz orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) 5G NR signals. To the authors’ knowledge, this work achieves the lowest noise figure among wideband designs covering the 5G FR2 spectrum.