A Dual-Band Millimeter-Wave Direct-Conversion Transmitter With Quadrature Error Correction

The analysis and implementation of a dual-band direct-conversion millimeter-wave transmitter is presented. The proposed dual-band modulator uses high-impedance loads at two frequencies for the local oscillator driving amplifiers and power amplifier (PA) pre-amplifiers. To correct the amplitude and phase imbalance of the in-phase and quadrature channels at Q- and W-bands, the paper suggests a digitally controlled quadrature error correction stage to finely calibrate these errors and lower the error vector magnitude (EVM) without increasing the baseband digital-to-analog converter resolution. The transmitter is fabricated in 0.12- μm silicon-germanium BiCMOS process and occupies an area of 5.5 mm². At 45-GHz carrier frequency, error correction improves the sideband suppression ratio (SSR) by 10 dB at 2.4-MHz IF frequency. The EVM is lowered from 3.21% to 2.38% for a 64-QAM constellation at a 2.4-Ms/s symbol rate. At 94-GHz carrier frequency, the SSR is improved from 24 to 41 dBc at 2.4-MHz IF frequency, and the EVM is lowered by more than 1% for a 16-QAM constellation at 3-Ms/s symbol rate. A dual-band PA breakout measurement indicates the peak power-added efficiency of 15% with 14-dBm maximum saturated power (Psat) at 43 GHz and 9-dBm Psat at 82 GHz is achieved.