mm-wave integrated wireless transceivers: Enabling technology for high bandwidth connections in IoT

Many application scenarios for IoT (Internet of Things) require the interconnection of high speed sensing nodes with data rates of Gbps. As an example surveillance or smart mobility applications adopt multiple photo and video cameras working at different spectral range (visible, near infrared, far infrared) and covering different fields of view, or they exploit arrays of radio/light detection and ranging (Radar/Lidar) sensors to detect the presence of targets, of their speeds, distance and direction. Even the access of distributed nodes in IoT towards a centralized cloud storage/processing center requires high data rate connections. Since low size and low weight of the nodes are needed, IoT can benefit from the high communication data rate, several Gbps, that can be provided by fully integrated mm-wave wireless transceivers. The wavelength at such frequency is few mm and hence the whole transceiver including the antenna can be integrated in a single chip. To this aim, this paper presents the design of 60 GHz transceiver key blocks (Low Noise Amplifier, Power Amplifier, Antenna) to ensure connection distances up to 10 m and data rate of several Gbps. Around 60 GHz worldwide there are freely-available (unlicensed) several GHz of bandwidth. By using a CMOS SOI technology RF, analog and digital baseband circuitry can be integrated in the same chip minimizing noise coupling. Even the antenna is integrated on chip reducing cost and size vs. classic off-chip antenna solutions. The proposed transceiver allows for the implementation of low cost nodes for IoT systems with data rates of several Gbps and with a 10 m link distance. These specifications are suitable for home/office scenarios, or for body area networks (healthcare, wellness) or for applications on board vehicles (cars, trains, ships, airplanes).