Variable 360° Vector-Sum Phase Shifter With Coarse and Fine Vector Scaling

• Published in: IEEE transactions on microwave theory and techniques 2016-07, Vol.64 (7), p.2113-2120
• Main Authors: Mohsenpour, Mohammad-Mahdi, Saavedra, Carlos E.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Active phase shifter; active summing junction; clock and data recovery; CMOS; IEEE 802.11n; LTE; Microwave circuits; MMICs; monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC); operational transconductance amplifiers (OTAs); Phase shifters; phased array; quadrature generation; radar; Resistors; RFIC; root mean square (rms) error; Transconductance; Tuning; WiMAX
• ISSN: 0018-9480; 1557-9670
• DOI: 10.1109/TMTT.2016.2574843

A CMOS vector-sum phase shifter covering the full 360° range is presented in this paper. Broadband operational transconductance amplifiers with variable transconductance provide coarse scaling of the quadrature vector amplitudes. Fine scaling of the amplitudes is accomplished using a passive resistive network. Expressions are derived to predict the maximum bit resolution of the phase shifter from the scaling factor of the coarse and fine vector-scaling stages. The phase shifter was designed and fabricated using the standard 130-nm CMOS process and was tested on-wafer over the frequency range of 4.9-5.9 GHz. The phase shifter delivers root mean square (rms) phase and amplitude errors of 1.25° and 0.7 dB, respectively, at the midband frequency of 5.4 GHz. The input and output return losses are both below 17 dB over the band, and the insertion loss is better than 4 dB over the band. The circuit uses an area of 0.303 mm 2 excluding bonding pads and draws 28 mW from a 1.2 V supply.