Gotmic (Sweden)

This paper presents a wideband GaAs low-noise amplifier (LNA) that operates as a pre-amplifier for a CMOS receiver, with a background motivation of a chiplet-level integration. A GaAs pre-amplifier will improve the total gain and noise performance of the receiver. The paper presents a comprehensive analytical method for wideband matching - a design methodology for optimum matching networks. As a result, this LNA features a particularly wide bandwidth from 60 to 100 GHz with an average gain of 15 dB. The LNA was implemented with 0.1-µm GaAs pHEMT technology. The circuit occupies a die area of 1 mm-, noise figure is 7.2-8.5 dB at 60–100 GHz with a gain of 12–21 dB and DC power consumption of 20 mW.

In this paper we present the design, characterisation and non-linear control of an analogue pre-distortion (APD) MMIC at E-band. With non-linear behaviour models of the APD MMIC, we demonstrate the capability of controlling the quadrature gain and quadrature third order term. Finally, the APD is combined with a 1 W E-band PA, where we by cascading their measured responses show overall more linear behaviour towards saturated output power compared with the non-linearised 1 W PA. Simulated with 256 QAM modulated signals, the average output power of the linearised PA was 22.2 dBm in comparison to 18.7 dBm.

An electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) structure is implemented on a printed-circuit board (PCB) as gasket between waveguide flanges. The proposed gasket can reduce leakage between waveguide flanges due to misalignment. A WR-6.5 waveguide proof-of-concept demonstration is presented in this paper covering 110 - 170 GHz with a return loss lower than 12 dB and over a 75 um of air gap between the flanges.

This paper presents the design and the experimental demonstration of transmission of spectrally efficient frequency division multiplexing (SEFDM) signals, using a single 5-GHz channel, from 81 to 86 GHz in the E-band frequency allocation. A purpose-built E-band SEFDM experimental demonstrator, consisting of transmitter and receiver GaAs microwave integrated circuits, along with a complete chain of digital signal processing is explained. Solutions are proposed to solve the channel and phase offset estimation and equalization issues, which arise from the well-known intercarrier interference between the SEFDM signal subcarriers. This paper shows the highest transmission rate of 12 Gb/s over a bandwidth varying between 2.67 to 4 GHz depending on the compression level of the SEFDM signals, which results in a spectral efficiency improvement by up to 50%, compared to the conventional orthogonal frequency division multiplexing modulation format.

In this paper, a direct IQ modulator MMIC with a novel differential architecture, for high speed E-band wireless communication is presented. The IQ modulator consists of two balanced resistive mixer cells, on-chip marchand balun and differential branchline coupler for quadrature LO signal generation. When operating as a single side band mixer, it shows conversion loss of 11 dB and side-band suppression higher than 20 dB. LO to RF isolation and OIP3 have been measured to be more than 30 dB and 13 dBm respectively, throughout the E-band. To the authors' best knowledge this is the first presented resistive IQ-modulator suitable for the full E-band.