IEEE Access (Jan 2022)
Wideband, Millimeter Wave Domain SI Canceling (>50dB) In-Band Full-Duplex Circulator Receiver
Abstract
This paper describes a 26-GHz fully integrated In-band Full-duplex Circulator (IBFD) Receiver (RX), which employs passive and active Self-interference Cancellation (SIC) techniques in the mm-wave domain. Coverage of wireless networks at mm-wave frequencies can be enhanced by deploying a large number of base stations economically based on Integrated Access and Backhaul (IAB) relays and repeaters. However, to retain the channel capacity, IAB needs to be implemented using full-duplex schemes that suffer from a strong Transmitter (TX) to RX SI. This SI leakage can significantly impact the receiver sensitivity and increase the baseband/ADC dynamic range requirements. Canceling SI at mm-wave applications is particularly challenging given the high frequency of operation, wide bandwidth, and antenna (ANT) impedance sensitivity to the surroundings. Proposed mm-wave RX with a shared ANT interface based on a circulator with active SI cancelers provide ~53 dB SIC over 400 MHz and ~40 dB SIC over 400 MHz in mm-wave domain to meet the link budget requirements. Proposed architecture achieves SIC by (i) introducing a shared ANT interface based on a hybrid-coupler and a non-reciprocal delay line that provides wideband SIC and additionally creates a SI replica (ii) subsequent active cancellation using SI replica processed with variable gain amplifiers and phase shifters. This system also accommodates SI channel variations due to surroundings. Proposed 26-GHz circulator RX has >100x better SIC at high TX power (>10dBm) levels in comparison to the state-of-the-art and it consumes ~111 mW power. The system is implemented in 45nm SOI CMOS and has an active area of $4.54\, mm^{2}$ . Stand-alone RX NF is ~5.8 dB and TX to ANT insertion loss (IL) is ~3.1 dB. Over-the-air measurements with modulated TX (128 QAM 2.1 Gb/s) and RX (128 QAM 4.2 Gb/s) signals show an EVM of 3.3%.
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