Design of a Q-band superheterodyne transceiver

The design of a Q-band superheterodyne transceiver for millimeter wave (mm Wave) communication is presented in this paper. The center frequency is 44.82 GHz with the channel bandwidth of 500 MHz. The overall system is divided into mm Wave frontend, the immediate frequency (IF) module and the local oscillator (LO) for IF. These three parts are implemented and tested respectively to ensure the performance. In order to evaluate the system performance in practical wireless communication, a testing platform constituted of a transmitter and a receiver is established. A 16QAM signal and a QPSK signal with the data rate of 400 Ms/s are transmitted by the transmitter, through 2-meter space attenuation, received and converted to baseband by the receiver. The demodulated baseband signals have the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of about 20 dB. The experimental results are satisfactory for such wide bandwidth and such high frequency.