An integrated differential 60 GHz sliding-IF receiver in SiGe BiCMOS

This paper presents an integrated 60 GHz sliding-IF receiver fabricated in a 0.25 μm SiGe BiCMOS technology. The receiver chain consists of a front-end and an IF IQ demodulator centered at around 12 GHz. A 48 GHz PLL is used to generate the front-end LO signal and the IF quadrature LO signals. The measured LNA noise figure is around 6.6 dB. Digital words are used to control the VGA gains and IQ mismatches through a Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) to reduce the number of bond pads. The receiver chip has been mounted onto an application board, where an on-board Vivaldi antenna has already been fabricated. An overall conversion gain of 81 dB has been measured with tuning range larger than 30 dB. In a real in-door environment, error-free transmission with a data-rate of 3.6 Gbit/s has been observed over 15 meters.