A Reconfigurable Ultra Compact Bi-directional Amplifier with a Build-in-Self Notch Filter for K/Ka-band Satellite Communication

Extremely high cost and form factor have become the most important reason limiting the promotion of K/Ka-band satellite communication (SATCOM) devices with thousands of phased-array channels. To address this challenge, a reconfigurable ultra compact bi-directional amplifier with a build-in-self notch filter in 45-nm CMOS SOI technology is presented in this paper. The receiver (RX) and transmitter (TX) can use one such reconfigurable chip rather than two different chips and cut the manufacturing cost by more than half. In this design, the low noise amplifier (LNA) is stacked into the power amplifier (PA) by using a magnetic coupling self-canceling technique, improving area efficiency greatly with negligible performance penalty. The reconfigurable bi-directional amplifier achieves 18.3 dBm max Psat and 15.9 dBm max OP1dB in PA mode while maintaining a minimum NF of 2.46 dB in LNA mode. The core area of this design is only 0.14 mm², which is similar to a conventional LNA or PA. Furthermore, benefiting from the design of build-in-self notch filter, the proposed bi-directional amplifier has good gain suppression (> 45 dB) to block the interferer from the TX chips in LNA mode. This work contributes a key innovation toward a new low-cost architecture for SATCOM, and it is the first reported high-performance bi-directional amplifier designed for K/Ka band SATCOM to the best of the author’s knowledge.