A 19GHz Circular Polarized 256-Element CMOS Phased-Array Transmitter with 11W Average Power Consumption for LEO Satellite Terminal

This article presents a 256-element CMOS active phased-array TX that works at 19GHz for LEO satellite applications. This work proposed a new structure for circular polarization (CP) wave generation that features low power consumption and enables dual-CP waves to be emitted in two directions. Besides, in the measurement, this work proposed a baseband CP cross-polarization interference cancellation technique implemented on an arbitrary waveform generator (AWG), which can improve the dual-CP signal’s signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for 10dB in the error vector magnitude (EVM) measurement. The proposed structure’s power consumption is 11W at 56 dBm average output power, which is 29.5% lower than the state-of-the-art. And it consumes 18W at 62 dBm maximum EIRP. The beam steering ability of this work can achieve ±65° with a side lobe level > 10 dB.