Design of rectenna series-association circuits for radio frequency energy harvesting in CMOS FD-SOI 28 nm

International audienceSeries-connected rectenna associations are proposed to improve the harvesting performance of conventional rectenna circuits by recovering power from different directions. With an available input power of -20 dBm, post-layout simulations evaluated the total output power of four series-connected rectennas designed in Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor Fully Depleted Silicon On Insulator (CMOS FD-SOI) 28 nm technology, to 14 μW at maximum power point (MPP), while the post-layout simulation of a single rectenna yields 5 μW at the same input power level. However, the rectenna association performance may be significantly degraded when dealing with different input power levels among rectennas. Therefore, a passive bypass circuit has been added at the output of the series association to short-circuit the weakest rectenna. The proposed design is cost-effective since there is a negligible silicon penalty and no additional power losses. In the designed four series-connected rectenna association, the total output power is 7 μW at MPP with the bypass circuit when the strongest and the weakest rectennas receive -20 and -35 dBm, respectively. Also, thanks to the bypass circuit, the efficiency of the rectenna association and the ratio of maximum achieved power are improved by, respectively, 10 and 20%

Characterization of a D-Band Active Transmitarray System for Efficient Point-To-Point Links

International audienceWe present the design and characterization of an innovative D-band transmitting antenna system. It comprises an active focal-plane array with two separate antennas which radiate two different signals, with adjacent bands, generated by an integrated circuit, and a flat discrete lens. The lens is designed to form a high-directivity broadside beam in both bands, i.e. from 139.3 GHz to 156.6 GHz. The use of two narrowband signals enhances the spectral efficiency and power consumption. Measurements show a remarkable improvement of transmitted power with respect to similar transmitters performing channel aggregation with guided components. The effective isotropic radiated power is higher than 25 dBm in a relative bandwidth of 11% and attains a peak value of 30.5 dBm. The measured radiation patterns are stable with frequency in each of the two sub-bands. The estimated antenna gain of the system (about 26 dBi) is in tight agreement with numerical data

A 28 dBm-EIRP low-profile D-band transmitting module with a folded transmitarray antenna

International audienceThis work presents the design and characterization of a high-gain transmitting module including a two-channel 45-nm CMOS transmitter and a folded transmitarray antenna. The proposed architecture enables the reduction by a factor three of the antenna height and a significant enhancement of the efficiency with respect to similar state-of-art D-band modules. The performance of this compact implementation is compared to that of a system based on a standard transmitarray. The experiments prove that the folded transmitarray preserves the effective isotropic radiated power (28 dBm at 148 GHz) achieved by the bulkier standard transmitarray, over the operating band of the integrated circuit, spanning from 139.3 GHz to 156.6 GHz

A highly directive D-band antenna module comprising a flat discrete lens and an active feed

International audienceThe design and characterization of a D-band active antenna for short-range communications are presented. An antenna-in-package, comprising a two-channel transmitter integrated circuit in 45-nm CMOS technology, a diplexer and a four-element patch array, excites a high-directivity transmitarray,i.e. a flat discrete lens. The lens is optimized to form a broadside beam and includes 2304 elements providing 16 different phase shifts. A standard printed circuit board process is used to fabricate the feed and the lens. The overall module achieves a high fractional bandwidth, operating between 139.4 GHz and 156.6 GHz, and a peak effective isotropic power of 17 dBm

A 42.24 Gb/s channel bonding up-converter with integrated multi-LO generation in 45nm CMOS

International audienceThis paper presents an energy-efficient wideband V-band channel-bonding up-converter. The circuit, fabricated in 45nm CMOS RFSOI technology is composed of four lanes and an output hybrid combiner based on differential coupled lines. The circuit has four I and Q inputs and each one gets up-converter to a different channel at V-band at the output. The four required LO frequencies (58.32, 60.48, 62.64 and 64.48 GH) are generated on-chip using high integer number frequency multiplication from a common reference input at 2.16 GHz that sets the channel spacing. Four-channel 64-QAM modulation is demonstrated with a total data rate of 42.24 Gb/s and 9.9 pJ/b of energy efficiency

A 57.6 Gb/s wireless link based on 25.4 dBm EIRP D-band transmitter module and a channel bonding chipset on CMOS 45nm

International audienceThis paper presents a baseband to D-band wireless link based on a transmitter module integrating a CMOS 45nm channel bonding chipset and a high-gain antenna implemented on PCB technology. The link achieves 57.6 Gb/s data rate using multi-channel 16-QAM and a link efficiency of 65 pJ/b/m

Performance assessment of a 5GNR D-band CMOS transceiver with phase noise impairments

International audienceTHz bands offer a strong potential with their wide available bandwidths which makes them a promising enabler for 6G. However, the channel propagation is challenging in those bands because of severe path loss attenuation and presence of strong phase noise. Besides, complementary metaloxide- semiconductor (CMOS) components, which prevail in mobile systems thanks to their interesting form factors and low production costs, reach their limits in such high frequencies. There is thus a need for concrete solutions for both system designs and signal processing techniques. The contributions of the proposed work are multiple: (i) we present the structure of a 4-channel D-band transceiver, (ii) we measure and derive the stochastic properties of the transceiver phase noise and (iii) we investigate and evaluate the performance of signal processing phase noise estimation and compensation techniques with the measured phase noise. We demonstrate that having an a-priori knowledge of phase noise correlated nature leads to a significant performance gain and we show in this work how to obtain it from LO characteristics

An Energy-Efficient 56-Gb/s D-Band TX-to-RX Link Using CMOS ICs and Transmitarray Antennas

International audienceThis letter presents an energy-efficient system with a transmitter and a receiver comprising multichannel integrated circuits (ICs) in 45-nm CMOS technology and antennas-in-package feeding high-directivity planar lenses. Data rates up to 56 Gb/s are demonstrated over a 1-m point-to-point link using a full-digital communication system. The active circuits integrate multiple local oscillator generators for implementing a channel-aggregation architecture that provides a large radio frequency (RF) bandwidth (BW) using a significantly narrower baseband (BB) interface BW. The energy consumption of the overall system is only 33 pJ/bit

A 56.32 Gb/s 16-QAM D-band wireless link using TX-RX systems-in-package with integrated multi-LO frequency synthesis in CMOS 45nm

International audienceThis paper presents an energy efficient ultra-wideband D-band wireless link using transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) systems-in-package modules based on channel-bonding architecture. The modules include TX and RX Integrated Circuits (ICs) fabricated in 45nm CMOS PDSOI technology and are co-integrated with patch array antennas using low-cost organic laminated (PCB) technology. Both, the TX and RX ICs are composed of two up-conversion and down-conversion chains, respectively, operating over contiguous sub-bands around 147.96 GHz. The multiple millimeter-wave (mmW) local oscillator signals (LOs) required are generated on-chip. Compared to previous works the presented transceiver achieves the highest data rate (56.32 Gb/s) among the D-band links by using 16 QAM modulation over 8 RF channels with a competitive energy consumption (TX+RX) of 18 pJ/bit, including the LOs generation circuitry