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A K-Band Fully-Connected 4-Channel Beamforming Transmitter IC for LEO SATCOM in 65nm CMOS
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- Authors
- Jongho Yoo, Junhan Lim, Seong-Mo Moon, Hakmin Lee, Hongkie Lim, Dong-pil Chan
- Issue Date
- 2026-06
- Citation
- Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium 2026, pp.1-4
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Language
- English
- Type
- Conference Paper
- Abstract
- This paper presents a 4-beam, 4-channel fully-connected beamforming transmitter IC implemented in 65nm CMOS for K/Ka-band low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communication downlinks. To reduce beamformer complexity and power consumption, a wideband low-loss twostage I/Q generator directly drives a variable-gain amplifier array, enabling Cartesian-coordinatedriven phase shifting without look-up table-based calibration. To enhance linear output power, an analog linearization technique is applied to a two-stacked power amplifier. The single-channel single-beam measurement results demonstrate a peak small-signal gain of 26 dB with a 3-dB gain bandwidth of 17–20 GHz, less than 1.3° RMS phase error, and less than 0.2 dB RMS amplitude error with 7-bit phase steps. The transmitter achieves 19.7 dBm OP1dB and 20.2 dBm Psat with peak drain efficiency/power-added efficiency (PAE) of 35.9%/23.0% at 19 GHz. Using a 64-QAM OFDM signal, the measured average output power reaches 13.6 dBm at -25 dB EVM with 8.5% transmitter PAE.
- Keyword
- Beamforming, CMOS, linearization, phased arrays, power amplifiers, satellite communication
- KSP Keywords
- 64-QAM, 65nm CMOS, Amplitude error, Beam measurement, Fully-connected, Look-Up-Table(LUT), Low earth orbit (LEO) satellite, OFDM signals, Output Power, Power Consumption, Power added efficiency(PAE)