4. Conclusion

The research on the front-end receiver designs in the unlicensed 60 GHz frequency band has been going on for several years now. Although a multitude of 60 GHz front-end configurations have been published in literature, they are not consequently optimized for low power consumption. In this context, the multi-port technique has been proposed as an attractive solution enabling the design of low-cost and compact wireless communication receivers at microwave and millimeter-wave frequency bands.

This chapter describes in detail the design of a low-power 60 GHz direct conversion front-end receiver based on the multi-port (six-port) concept, using a less costly MHMIC fabrication process. The demodulation performances of the proposed front-end receiver structure have been experimentally proven through various M-PSK/M-QAM demodulated signals. The obtained demodulation results, demonstrating the ability of the proposed 60 GHz six-port front-end receiver to directly demodulate PSK or QAM millimeter-wave signals to baseband, or even to down-convert them in quadrature to a given intermediate frequency (IF), create a real expansion opportunity to the future compact, low-power, and low-cost 60 GHz wireless communication systems.
