A dual-channel broadband millimeter-wave receiver front-end design for mobile communication

The design of a dual-channel broadband millimeter-wave receiver front-end for the next generation mobile communication is presented in this article. The front-end operates at 28GHz with 2GHz and 500MHz bandwidth in radio frequency (RF) and immediate frequency (IF) respectively. A scheme of single downconversion is used and a compact substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) bandpass filter is designed to suppress the RF interferences out-of-band. The realized front-end obtains good RF performance from 27.75GHz to 28.25GHz. The measured conversion gain is greater than 27dB for both channels, while the flatness is below 0.8dB. The noise figure of the front-end is less than 4.5dB and an input third-order intercept point (IIP3) above −12.6dBm is achieved. An error vector magnitude (EVM) test is also performed across the bandwidth and the result shows excellent overall receiving performance of the proposed receiver front-end.