A 60-GHz Highly-Reused Joint Radar-Communication Transceiver with Reconfigurable Dual-Mode Gilbert Cells in 65-nm CMOS

A 60-GHz joint radar-communication (JRC) transceiver fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS process is introduced in this paper. Benefiting from a reconfigurable dual-mode Gilbert cell which could not only operate as an up-conversion mixer for the baseband signal but could also be configured as an amplifier for the LO signal, a highly-reused JRC transceiver architecture is realized. In the radar mode, instead of utilizing the narrow-band IF chirp modulation scheme which is widely adopted in previous JRC systems, in this work a wideband chirp generated directly from the LO chain could be applied for both transmitting and direct RF de-chirping, significantly improving the range resolution and relieving the hardware burden in radar signal processing. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed JRC transceiver supports >7 Gb/s data rate in the 16-QAM over-the-air communication, as well as > 4 GHz transmitted chirp bandwidth with < 3.75 cm range resolution in the radar mode.