학술논문

A Low-Power Radiation-Hardened Ka-Band CMOS Phased-Array Receiver for Small Satellite Constellation
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits Solid-State Circuits, IEEE Journal of. 59(2):349-363 Feb, 2024
Subject
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Engineered Materials, Dielectrics and Plasmas
Computing and Processing
Satellites
Low earth orbit satellites
Power demand
Gain
Solar panels
Receiving antennas
Satellite broadcasting
CMOS
Ka-band
low power
low Earth orbit (LEO)
magnetic tuning
multi-coupling
phase shifter
phased array
radiation hardness
satellite communication
Language
ISSN
0018-9200
1558-173X
Abstract
This article introduces a low-power radiation-hardened $Ka$ -band CMOS phased-array receiver for the low Earth orbit (LEO) small satellite communication system. As the available solar panel area limits the power consumption of the receiver, a multi-coupling common-gate (CG) low noise amplifier (LNA) with current-sharing topology and built-in 180° phase shifter is proposed in this work to solve the power issue. The multi-coupling LNA utilizes three coupling inductors to reduce the input matching impedance with a smaller input CMOS transistor size. After implementing the proposed technique, a single beamformer realized a 3.4-mW typical power consumption compared with the conventional works with 17.3–195-mW power consumption. The receiver with magnetic-tuning phase shifter (MTPS) has 0.06-dB/Mrad gain and 0.4°/Mrad phase degradations and is the lowest reported root-mean-square phase and gain errors due to radiation. The proposed receiver achieves −22-dBm IIP3 with a 3.8-dB noise figure. The required on-chip area for each element is only 0.2 mm2. In the over-the-air (OTA) measurement, digital video broadcasting-second generation extension (DVB-S2x) standard modulated signals of up to 256 amplitude phase shift keying (APSK) can be supported by the proposed large array modules. This work realizes −33.2-dB error vector magnitude (EVM) and 12.8-Gb/s link speed with 1.6-GHz channel bandwidth. The measured beam pattern can cover radiated angle from −50° to +50° with lower than −10-dBc sidelobe level. Because of the proposed multi-coupling LNA and MTPS, a low-power radiation-hardened phased-array receiver for small LEO satellites can be achieved in this work.