A Low-Power 256-Element Ka-Band CMOS Phased-Array Receiver With On-Chip Distributed Radiation Sensors for Small Satellite Constellations

This article presents a low-power 256-element Ka -band CMOS phased-array receiver utilizing ON-chip distributed radiation sensors for the low Earth orbit (LEO) small satellite communication system. Since the available solar cell area limits the power generation of the small LEO satellites, a distributed current-sharing common-gate (CG) low noise amplifier (LNA) and a voltage-tuning variable gain amplifier (VGA) are introduced to reduce power consumption. After utilizing the proposed technique, the power consumption of the beamformer is 2.95 mW/element. Moreover, the proposed voltage-tuning VGA is configured to utilize both upper and lower transistors for gain contributions to save power. The ON-chip distributed radiation sensors are presented to eliminate the non-uniform radiation influence and realize 0.22-dB/Mrad gain degradation performance. The proposed receiver achieves −20-dBm single-element IIP3 with a 3.6-dB noise figure. The occupied ON-chip area for a single element is only 0.24 mm2. DVB-S2X standard modulated signals of up to 256 amplitude and phase-shift keying (APSK) can be supported in the over-the-air (OTA) measurement. The receiver achieves −31.3-dB EVM and 24-Gb/s link speed under 1.5-GBaud dual-linear polarization signals. The measured 256-element beam pattern can cover radiated angle from −50° to +50° with lower than −9-dBc sidelobe level. Thanks to the proposed low-power distributed current-sharing CG LNA and ON-chip radiation sensors, a low-power radiation-hardened phased-array receiver can be achieved for the small LEO satellites.