A 60GHz 144-element phased-array transceiver with 51dBm maximum EIRP and ±60° beam steering for backhaul application

Abstract

The 802.11ad standard (WiGig) provides throughput speeds of multi-Gb/s covering tens of meters and uses beamforming in the four 2GHz-wide channels in the 60gHz ISM band. Conventional backhaul solutions, on the other hand, are designed with high gain directional antennas with no electronic beam steering and have high cost for installation and alignment of antennas. This paper presents a full-featured 802.11ad chipset with 144-element phased array using a tiled approach and CMOS IPs developed for WiGig to address low-cost municipal WiFi, small-cell backhauling, and broadband to home covering the last mile. Designed with a link budget of 120dB+, the phased-array solution can be mounted on top of lamp posts and roof-top buildings covering a 200m LOS, and with tens of hops a range of 2km can be covered from a single point of fiber. Moreover, the steerable phased arrays enable dynamic routing optimization between hopping nodes in a mesh network.