Design of Front-End of Wireless Data Link for Millimeter-wave Indoor Communications

The present work highlights the design and development of radio frequency (RF) front-end and baseband architecture for wireless data link at 60 GHz for high speed short range communications. The millimeter-wave (mm-wave) technology, especially the 60 GHz frequency band (57 - 64GHz) has been found as an attractive choice for 5G indoor communications. However, the special characteristics of mm-wave sets new challenges in the signal processing, circuit, antenna and communication technologies. The antenna beamforming technology employing multiple antennas is considered as a viable solution to increase the link capacity by allowing directional communication. This paper concentrates on the design of RF front end at 60 GHz including a realistic phased array antenna model with non-linear model of power amplifier. The link budget is calculated to establish the feasibility of the system design over the wireless link and also to evaluate the required gain of the phased array. The system performance is estimated in terms of bit error rate (BER).