A K-Band 4-Element 8-Beam Phased-Array Receiver with Hybrid Vector Interpolation and Impedance-Adapted Multibeam Combining Techniques for Satellite Communications

This paper presents a K-band four-element eight-beam receiver in 65-nm CMOS for satellite communications. To overcome the high insertion loss of the multibeam combining network, the receiver utilizes a hybrid vector-interpolation-based phase shifting technique. Furthermore, a transmission-line-based impedance tuner is employed to adapt its impedance to enhance the gain at high frequency band, further mitigating the insertion loss. The chip demonstrates a 360° phase-shifting range with 6-bit resolution and a 31.5-dB attenuation range with 0.5-dB step. The measured rms phase and gain errors are 2.9° and 0.41 dB at 19.5 GHz, respectively. Each element achieves a gain of 33 dB, a 3.3–4.2 dB noise figure (NF), and an input-referred 1-dB gain compression point (IP1dB) of -45 dBm. This phased-array receiver optimizes the multi-element multi-beam combining network loss and boosts the receiver’s performance, which can also benefit other multi-element multi-beam transmitter/receiver designs.