A CMOS Fully Integrated 120-Gbps RF-64QAM F-Band Transmitter with an On-Chip Antenna for 6G Wireless Communication

This paper presents a single-chip bits-to-antenna transmitter (TX) for >100 Gbps in 45nm CMOS SOI. The construction of the 64QAM constellation is achieved directly in the RF domain by utilizing three QPSK sub-TXs with weighted amplitude. This method significantly reduces the need to address power amplifier nonlinear effects in high-order modulation, thereby creating room for TX enhancements in both bandwidth and output power. To further improve TX performance, multi-step phase alignment strategies, and a local oscillator leakage suppression technique have been incorporated. With 40-GHz RF bandwidth, the RF-64QAM TX prototype is able to achieve a measured data rate of 120 Gbps with 15dBm effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP).