An RF Transceiver with Full Digital Interface Supporting 5G New Radio FR1 with 3.84Gbps DL/1.92Gbps UL and Dual-Band GNSS in 14nm FinFET CMOS

This paper presents an RF CMOS transceiver supporting all cellular protocols including 5G Frequency Range (FR) 1 with eighteen receiver pipelines and two chains of transmitters. To transfer data for all combinations of carrier aggregation (CA) and a dual-band quad-GNSS system efficiently to a modem, a fully-digital interface is implemented instead of a conventional analog interface, resulting in enhanced signal integrity and smaller PCB area. The digitally-intensive design of this work, implemented in 14nm CMOS process, boosts the performance of RF/analog circuits with various digital-aid calibrations.