Self-Synchronized DS/SS With High Spread Factors for Robust Millimeter-Wave Datalinks

This paper presents direct sequence spread spectrum (DS/SS) datalinks operating at 92-100 GHz with spreading factors up to 100K. Unlike traditional DS/SS datalinks which rely on preamble and cyclic dispreading for synchronization, the reported datalink uses a self-synchronous demodulation scheme, avoiding the large hardware complexity associated with exceptionally large spreading factors, and avoiding the difficulties of synchronizing the long de-spreading codes that are applicable to mm-wave systems. A demonstration link chipset is presented operating at 92-100 GHz with a spreading factor of 104K and a spread bandwidth of 6.0 GHz (baseband bandwidth of 56Kb/s) while consuming a total of 425mW.