People:
Chintan S Thakkar, Prof. Ali Niknejad, Prof. Elad Alon
Ultra-high data rate wireless communication over the 60GHz band
has gained increasing interest for potentially high data-rate transfer,
lossless multimedia streaming and collaborative communication.
In response, both academic and industrial groups have begun to demonstrate
transceiver solutions for applications such as in the home HDTV streaming. Since these designs are targeted at set-top boxes with multi-Watt level
power dissipation, communication techniques with relatively high levels of
circuit and signal processing complexity (such as OFDM) can be applied. However, in order to enable the use of the 60GHz band for high data-rate
local communication in a mobile handset environment, the energy-efficiency
of the overall transceiver must be drastically improved. Our work is therefore
focused on minimizing the energy-per-bit of a multi-Gb/s 60GHz transceiver through
comprehensive design and optimization of the circuit components and
communication system.
As a first step to maximizing a transceiver’s energy-efficiency,
it is critical to study and fully characterize the communication channel
since it dictates the constraints and requirements of the overall design.
While other groups have begun such channel modeling/characterization
efforts as well, their focus has been mostly on fixed transceivers with
highly directional antennas (neither of which may be appropriate for
a handset application). Thus, we are currently conducting a set of
experimental measurements of various 60GHz channels at BWRC.
This set of measurements will then be leveraged to make intelligent
decisions about the transceivers coding, modulation, and equalization
strategies – in particular taking into account the implications on both
the RF and baseband circuit requirements in terms of dynamic range,
complexity, and power consumption.
Fig. 1: Measuring the 60 GHz channel (chip-photo courtesy: C. H. Doan,
S. Emami, A. M. Niknejad, and R. W. Brodersen, “A 60-GHz down-converting
CMOS single-gate mixer,” RFIC Digest of Papers, 2005)
