16‐QAM‐Based Highly Spectral‐Efficient E‐band Communication System with Bit Rate up to 10 Gbps

This paper presents a novel 16‐quadrature‐amplitude‐modulation (QAM) E‐band communication system. The system can deliver 10 Gbps through eight channels with a bandwidth of 5 GHz (71‐76 GHz/81‐86 GHz). Each channel occupies 390 MHz and delivers 1.25 Gbps using a 16‐QAM. Thus, this system can achieve a bandwidth efficiency of 3.2 bit/s/Hz. To implement the system, a driver amplifier and an RF up‐/down‐conversion mixer are implemented using a 0.1 µm gallium arsenide pseudomorphic high‐electron‐mobility transistor (GaAs pHEMT) process. A single‐IF architecture is chosen for the RF receiver. In the digital modem, 24 square root raised cosine filters and four (255, 239) Reed‐Solomon forward error correction codecs are used in parallel. The modem can compensate for a carrier‐frequency offset of up to 50 ppm and a symbol rate offset of up to 1 ppm. Experiment results show that the system can achieve a bit error rate of 10−5 at a signal‐to‐noise ratio of about 21.5 dB.