Millimeter-wave beam forming on silicon

The beam forming at millimeter-wave for commercial standards like IEEE 802.11ad, is drawing much attention recently. Despite its advantages of high gain, beam-steering capability, and wide spatial coverage, phased-array requires power-hungry and costly multiple channels, especially in large-scale array systems. Thus, it becomes crucial to develop low power and compact circuits for the systems to be economically used in the commercial applications, where the power and cost are majorly concerned. The work starts from the background of beam forming techniques, investigates silicon based consideration and recent development of the key building blocks catering for low power low cost commercial applications.