A low power 8th sub-harmonic injection locked receiver for mm-Wave beamforming applications

This paper presents a single element V-band low power 8^th sub-harmonic injection locked beamforming receiver. A significant savings in local oscillator (LO) routing power is achieved by using an 8^th sub-harmonic injection locked oscillator (SILO) for frequency multiplication and phase-shifting. Power consumption of the LNA and mixer is lowered by means of transformer feedback techniques. The proposed receiver is implemented in a standard 0.13 μm BiCMOS process and occupies an active area of only 630 μm × 400 μm. The receiver consumes a minimum power of 11.4 mW and achieves a peak gain of 8.3 dB, IP_1dB of -33.5 dBm, minimum NF of 7.7 dB and an IF bandwidth of larger than 11 GHz. A total phase-shift of 144° is measured. The proposed LO routing and phase-shifting scheme shows minimum power consumption among state-of-the-art receivers and is easily scalable to multiple elements.