A Wideband IF Receiver Module for Flexibly Scalable mmWave Beamforming Combining and Interference Cancellation

Large-scale phased arrays need to combine weighted signals from multiple sub-arrays either in analog or in digital domain. Sub-arrays are preferably implemented modularly with integrated circuits placed next to the associated antennas. In order to enable flexible and scalable combining networks of several mmWave sub-arrays, this paper presents a wideband receiver module that provides the cartesian combining of beamforming weights for one sub-array at IF. Furthermore, it allows interference cancellation between sub-arrays or combining multiple sub-arrays. It also provides filtering before ADCs to support current and foreseeable 5G channel bandwidths up to 800MHz. The receiver is operating at 2-4GHz IF frequency range and has more than 400MHz baseband bandwidth, a noise-figure of 5.5dB, -6dBm 1dB compression point and +3dBm in-band IIP3. In addition, over-the-air measurements are performed, showing 26dB of interference cancellation between the sub-arrays. The prototype is implemented using 45nm CMOS PDSOI.