Architectures, Antennas and Circuits for Millimeter-wave Wireless Full-Duplex Applications

Abstract

Demand for wireless network capacity keeps growing exponentially every year, as a result a 1000-fold increase in data traffic is projected over the next 10 years in the context of 5G wireless networks. Solutions for delivering the 1000-fold increase in capacity fall into three main categories: deploying smaller cells, allocating more spectrum and improving spectral efficiency of wireless systems. Smaller cells at RF frequencies (1-6GHz) are unlikely to deliver the demanded capacity increase. On the other hand, millimeter-wave spectrum (frequencies over 24GHz) offers wider, multi-GHz channel bandwidths, and therefore has gained significant research interest as one of the most promising solutions to address the data traffic demands of 5G. Another disruptive technology is full-duplex which breaks a century-old assumption in wireless communication, by simultaneous transmission and reception on the same frequency channel. In doing so, full-duplex offers many benefits for wireless networks, including an immediate spectral efficiency improvement in the physical layer. Although FD promises great benefits, self-interference from the transmitter to its own receiver poses a fundamental challenge. The self-interference can be more than a billion times stronger than the desired signal and must be suppressed below the receiver noise floor. In recent years, there has been some research efforts on fully-integrated full-duplex RF transceivers, but mm-wave fully-integrated full-duplex systems, are still in their infancy. This dissertation presents novel architectures, antenna and circuit techniques to merge two exciting technologies, mm-wave and full-duplex, which can potentially offer the dual benefits of wide bandwidths and improved spectral efficiency. To this end, two different antenna interfaces, namely a wideband reconfigurable T/R antenna pair with polarization-based antenna cancellation and an mm-wave fully-integrated magnetic-free non-reciprocal circulator, are presented. The polarization-based antenna cancellation is employed in conjunction with the RF and digital cancellation to design a 60GHz full-duplex 45nm SOI CMOS transceiver with nearly 80dB self-interference suppression. The concepts and prototypes presented in this dissertation have also profound implications for emerging applications such as vehicular radars, 5G small-cell base-stations and virtual reality