System Implications in Designing a 60 GHz WLAN RF Front-End

In this paper, we seek to evaluate the performance of a 60 GHz WLAN system taking into account RF circuitry imperfections and hardware requirements for various modulation techniques. A model of an RF frontend is developed, including physical imperfections of the circuitry such as power amplifier (PA) nonlinearity and voltage controlled oscillator VCO phase noise. Given the RF front-end model, several modulation techniques such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and Continuous Phase Modulation (CPM) are considered. The evaluation of the system performance in terms of bit error rate allows a better understanding of physical circuitry limitations, and optimal modulation parameters as well as circuit design recommendations can be derived.