An 18–32-GHz Reconfigurable Multi-Beam Phased-Array Transceiver in 65-nm CMOS for Wideband Wireless Communications

This paper presents an 18–32-GHz eight-element phased array transceiver (TRX) with four simultaneously reconfigurable beams. It employs a triple-coupled transformer (TCT) embedded T/R switch topology with 2nd harmonic trapping technique to boost power and noise performances of the T/R front ends. A millimeter-wave field-programmable beamforming network (BFN) is proposed to support the bidirectional multi-beam aggregation and regulation. The chip was fabricated in 65-nm CMOS and occupies a 22.88-mm² area. It achieves 56% fractional bandwidth, <5.7-dB receive noise figure (NF) at 18–32 GHz, and 18.3/18.8-dBm transmit peak 1-dB gain compression point (P1dB)/saturated output power (Psat). It demonstrates a state-of-the-art number of reconfigurable beams in millimeter-wave RF-beamforming phased array TRXs with decent noise and power performances.