This paper presents the design of an X-band complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) radio frequency (RF) transceiver integrated circuit (IC) for data communications, which comprises RF front ends, frequency synthesizers, baseband amplifier (BBA) blocks, analog-to-digital converter and digital-to-analog converter (ADC/DAC), and digital front-end blocks. The receiver is designed with a direct-conversion architecture, using a 65 nm CMOS process. The dimensions of the die are 5×5 mm. The RF circuits achieves sufficient gain and electrostatic discharge (ESD) reliability using an on-chip transformer. The measured gain and noise figure (NF) of the receiver are over 90 dB and below 5.5 dB, respectively. The maximum output power and output third-order intercept point (OIP3) of the transmitter exceed 8 dBmand 16 dBm, respectively. The power consumed by the transmitter and receiver modes are 287 mW and 178 mW, respectively, for a 1.2 V supply.
Jang et al. (Fri,) studied this question.