Design and analysis of six-port correlators for 60GHz six-port receiver

Abstract

Wireless communications is ubiquitous nowadays. Mobile devices such as smart phones, iPADs and laptops are commonly used for the exchange of information between users and/or machines. With the increasing demand for high speed wireless communication system to support consumers’ needs for real time streaming of high definition (HD) video and fast file transfers, high data rate is required in the radio systems. In addition, the radio system must be compact, low cost and low power for especially for commercial wireless application. Six-port receivers have been attracting attention at the mm-wave frequencies. They offered many advantages as compared to the conventional receiver architecture at the mm-wave frequencies in terms of bandwidth, size and power consumption. Six-port receiver consists of three building blocks namely six-port correlator, power detection and baseband recovery. The six-port correlator is the fundamental building block of a six-port receiver. However, it suffers from non-ideal effects such as amplitude imbalance and phase imbalance contribute by its building blocks. In this thesis, analysis had been done on non-ideal effects such as the amplitude and phase imbalance of the two of the literature six-port correlators. Through the analysis, two novel six-port correlators were designed and sent for fabrication. Eventually, the two proposed six-port correlators were simulated together with the power detectors and amplifiers to demonstrate its intended operation as six-pot receivers.