A Rectifier-type Mixer for 5G NR Wirelessly Powered Relay Transceiver with Optimizable Rectification and Mixing

This paper proposes a CMOS rectifier-type mixer where the mixing operation and rectification can be optimized independently. The proposed circuit utilizes a 24 GHz wireless power transfer (WPT) signal as the LO to generate DC power and perform frequency up/down conversion with the 28GHz 5G signal. The rectifier-type mixer generates DC power with an efficiency of 36.4% and achieves frequency conversion with TX/RX conversion gains of -7.6 dB/-7.4 dB. A prototype phased-array transceiver with dual-polarized antennas is realized by implementing four proposed chips and is powered by WPT for over-the-air (OTA) measurement. The measurement results confirm that the transceiver is capable of transmitting and receiving a 64QAM modulated signal with a 400MHz bandwidth at 28 GHz as well as beamforming operation. This is verified through error vector magnitude (EVM) evaluation using a 5G new radio (NR) compliant orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) mode modulated signal.