A modular 16NM Direct-RF TX/RX Embedding 9GS/S DAC and 4.5GS/S ADC with 90DB Isolation and Sub-80PS Channel Alignment for Monolithic Integration in 5G Base-Station SoC

This work presents direct-RF TX/RX modular tiles for monolithic integration in 16nm FinFET. The TX tile embeds 4 baseband-to-RF signal chains with 14-bit 9GS/s DACs while the RX tile provides 2 RF-to-baseband signal chains with 13-bit 4.5GS/s ADCs. Each tile includes a low-noise PLL [1] and can support full Nyquist bandwidth. The TX path demonstrates better than −67dBc ACPR when synthetizing a half-loaded band 42 and consumes 700mW. The RX path shows an EVM of 11.6% for the in-band blocking test of the 3.5GHz band and consumes 747mW. These tiles have been integrated in a 372mm2 FPGA SoC and demonstrate better than 90dB digital-to-analog isolation and sub-80ps channel alignment.