Amr Ahmed, Linjie Li, Minjae Jung, Gabriel M. Rebeiz

University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

D-band communications (at 110-170 GHz) can be a key to fulfill the increasing demand on low latency and high data rate links. This is due to the wide unallocated frequency spectrum of up to 60 GHz. Hence, D-band wireless systems (140 GHz) have been an emerging topic for 6G communications. However, D-band systems are very challenging due to the need of large phase arrays to overcome the propagation loss (space loss factor).

At UCSD, we developed the first-ever on-grid 2-D 8x8-element transmit-receive array at 140 GHz with  wide scanning angles and full array scalability. The 140 GHz wafer-scale RFIC (built in 45RFSOI) containing 64 channels and an up/down-converter to an IF of 9-14 GHz, the 8x8 antenna-in-package module and the DC/SPI boards are all designed at UCSD. The measured Tx and Rx phased-array system can support a communication link of up to 24 Gbps with <4% EVM_rms for both transmit and receive operation. The measured TX EIRP is 37.5 dBm at 140 GHz which is the highest reported values for silicon technologies to-date.