The research on the design of receiver front-ends for very high data-rate communication in the 60 GHz band in nanoscale Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technologies is going on for some time now. Although a multitude of 60 GHz front-ends have been published in recent years, they are not consequently optimized for low power consumption. Thus, these front-ends dissipate too much power for battery-powered applications like handheld devices, mobile phones, and wireless sensor networks. This article describes the design of a direct conversion receiver front-end that addresses the issue of power consumption, while at the same time permitting low cost (due to area minimization by the use of spiral inductors). It is implemented in a 65 nm CMOS technology. The realized front-end achieves a record power consumption of only 43 mW including low-noise amplifier (LNA), mixer, a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO), a local oscillator (LO) buffer, and a baseband buffer (without this latter buffer the power consumption is even lower, only 29 mW). Its pad-limited size is 0.55 × 1 mm2. At the same time, the front-end achieves state-of-the-art performance with respect to its other properties: Its maximum measured power conversion gain is 30 dB, the RF and IF bandwidths are 56.5–61.5 and 0–1.5 GHz, respectively, its measured minimum noise figure is 9.2 dB, and its measured IP−1 dB is −36 dBm.
Development of a low-power, low-cost front end electronics module for large scale distributed neutrino detectors