A 60-GHz Highly Reused Joint Radar– Communication Transceiver With Reconfigurable Dual-Mode Gilbert Cells in 65-nm CMOS

Abstract

A 60-GHz joint radar–communication (JRC) transceiver is introduced in this letter. Benefiting from a reconfigurable dual-mode Gilbert cell, which could not only operate as an upconversion mixer for the baseband signal but could also be configured as an amplifier for the LO signal, a highly reused JRC transceiver architecture is realized. In the radar mode, instead of utilizing the narrowband IF chirp modulation scheme, which is widely adopted in previous JRC systems, in this work, a wideband chirp generated directly from the LO chain could be applied for both transmitting and direct RF dechirping, thereby significantly improving the range resolution and relieving the hardware burden in radar signal processing. Fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS process, this work achieves a 16-dBm saturated TX output power, an 11-dBm OP $_{1~\mathrm {dB}}$ , and a 5.8-dB minimum RX noise figure (NF). Experiments demonstrate that the proposed JRC transceiver supports >7-Gb/s data rate in the 16-QAM over-the-air (OTA) communication as well as >4-GHz transmitted chirp bandwidth with <3.75-cm range resolution in the radar mode.