A 37–43.5 GHz front‐end MMIC for 5G high‐performance channel emulator in 0.1 μm GaAs pHEMT

Abstract

AbstractA front‐end MMIC working at 37–43.5 GHz for 5G high‐performance channel emulator is presented in this paper. The chip is fabricated in a 0.1‐μm commercial GaAs pHEMT process and integrated with a passive star mixer and a local oscillator (LO) chain, which is composed of a frequency tripler, a bandpass filter, a power amplifier, and an LO filter. The 10.5 GHz intermediate frequency (IF) signal is upconverted with the high frequency LO signal of 48–54 GHz through a passive double‐balanced star mixer, which can output 37–43.5 GHz radiofrequency signal. The high frequency LO can avoid the increase of bit error rate caused by the frequency band of input signal covering IF frequency. The conversion gain of −11.2 to −9.7 dB, the OP1‐dB of −0.26 to 1.7 dBm are achieved and the front‐end chip occupies an area of 2.78 × 0.9 mm2.