Dual-Channel Tx/Rx-Front-Ends for High Resolution Radar at 160 GHz

This paper presents the design, evaluation, and performance of two dual-channel radar monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs), a transmitter and a receiver. Sophisticated chip layouts mitigate the limitations imposed by only three interconnection layers and leverage the strengths of the used InGaAs high-electron-mobility transistor technology. The local oscillator (LO) chains include substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) filters whose high selectivity and stop-band width exceed that of conventional transmission line-based filters. For system-level simulations, the process of representing nonlinear circuit blocks with behavioral models is described. It results in a significant decrease of required computational effort without loss of accuracy. This is evident from a comparison to on-wafer measurements, including conversion performance, LO suppression, channel-to-channel isolation, harmonic distortions, and noise figure. In addition, absolute phase noise measurements of the transmitter and the used synthesizer were performed, providing an indication of the residual phase noise.