A 71-76GHz wideband receiver front-end for phased array applications in 0.13 μ SiGe BiCMOS technology

This paper presents the design of a millimeter-wave wideband receiver front-end in a 0.13m SiGe BiCMOS technology for phased array applications. The receiver front-end is suitable for a phased array time-division duplexing communication system where both the transmitter and the receiver share the same antenna. The monolithic microwave integrated circuit front-end comprises of quarter-wave shunt switches, a low-noise amplifier (LNA), an active phase shifter and a buffer amplifier. The quarter-wave shunt switch is designed using reverse-saturated SiGe HBTs. The transformer-based LNA utilizes a common-emitter amplifier at the first stage and a cascode amplifier at the second stage to exploit the advantages of both common-emitter and cascode topologies. The designed switch is incorporated in the input matching network of the LNA. The active phase shifter consists of variable gain amplifiers driven by a polyphase filter-based quadrature generator. The receiver front-end achieves a measured gain of 18.5dB and a noise figure of 9dB with a 3dB bandwidth of 23GHz from 56 to 79GHz. The receiver phase can be tuned continuously from 0 degrees to 360 degrees. An output referred 1-dB compression point of -7.4dBm is achieved at 70GHz. The receiver consumes 116mW of DC power and occupies a core area of 1800 m x 475 mu m.