Performance Assessment of a 5GNR D-Band CMOS Transceiver with Phase Noise Impairments

Sub-THz bands offer a strong potential with their wide available bandwidths, which makes them a promising enabler for 6G. However, the channel propagation is challenging in those bands because of severe path loss attenuation. Hardware impairments are also strong especially phase noise (PN). Besides, silicon based components, which prevail in mobile systems thanks to their low production costs, reach their limits in such high frequencies. There is thus a need for specific solutions for both system designs and signal processing techniques. The contributions of the proposed work are multiple: (i) based on a CMOS D-Band transceiver, we measure and derive the stochastic properties of the transceiver PN and, (ii) we investigate and evaluate the performance of signal processing PN estimation and compensation techniques, with the measured PN for OFDM and DFT-s-OFDM waveforms. We demonstrate that the use of the proposed algorithm based on the statistic properties of the correlated nature of the PN, leads to a significant performance gain in DFT-s-OFDM systems. We consider a real measurement of the PN power spectral density and standard and extended 5G-NR numerologies.