A 60-GHz CMOS sub-harmonic RF receiver with integrated on-chip artificial-magnetic-conductor Yagi antenna and balun bandpass filter for very-short-range gigabit communications

This paper presents a first reported 60-GHz CMOS sub-harmonic RF receiver with an integrated on-chip artificial-magnetic-conductor (AMC) Yagi antenna and a balun bandpass filter (BPF) fabricated in 90-nm technology. The on-chip antenna with an AMC structure can reduce the substrate loss and increase the antenna radiation efficiency and power gain. The on-chip balun BPF combines the integrated design of the balun and RF BPF to reduce the circuit size and the insertion loss. The sub-harmonic receiver is adopted to mitigate the dc offset problem. The probe-station based on-wafer continuous wave wireless transmission test is conducted (R=1 m) and the measured total receiving conversion gain CG_ant+Rx and output third-order intercept point of the integrated RF receiver (with the on-chip AMC antenna and the balun BPF) are 16.2 dB and 3 dBm at 60 GHz, respectively. In error vector magnitude/bit error rate (BER) tests, the measured maximum data rate is 1.152 Gb/s in the 16QAM mode at a 25-cm wireless link (transmitting EIRP}=23 dBm) approximately with a BER of 10 ^-3. The presented integrated RF receiver will be very useful for the design of a 60-GHz fully integrated CMOS single-chip radio for very-short-range communication applications.