Front-End Development for Radar Applications: A Focus on 24 GHz Transmitter Design

The proliferation of radar technology has given rise to a growing demand for advanced, high-performance transmitter front-ends operating in the 24 GHz frequency band. This paper presents a design analysis of a radio frequency (RF) transmitter (TX) front-end operated at a 24 GHz frequency and designed using 65 nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology for radar applications. The proposed TX front-end design includes the integration of an up-conversion mixer and power amplifier (PA). The up-conversion mixer is a Gilbert cell-based design that translates the 2.4 GHz intermediate frequency (IF) signal and 21.6 GHz local oscillator (LO) signal to the 24 GHz RF output signal. The mixer is designed with a novel technique that includes a duplex transconductance path (D_TP) for enhancing the mixer's linearity. The D_TP of the mixer includes a primary transconductance path (P_TP) and a secondary transconductance path (S_TP). The P_TP incorporates a common source (CS) amplifier, while the S_TP incorporates an improved cross-quad transconductor (I_CQT). The integrated PA in the TX front-end is a class AB tunable two-stage PA that can be tuned with the help of varactors as a synchronous mode to increase the PA bandwidth or stagger mode to obtain a high gain. The PA is tuned to 24 GHz as a synchronous mode PA for the TX front-end operation. The proposed TX front-end showed an excellent output power of 11.7 dBm and dissipated 7.5 mW from a 1.2 V supply. In addition, the TX front-end achieved a power-added efficiency (PAE) of 47% and 1 dB compression point (OP₁dB) of 10.5 dBm. In this case, the output power is 10.5 dBm higher than the linear portion of the response. The methodologies presented herein have the potential to advance the state of the art in 24 GHz radar technology, fostering innovations in fields such as autonomous vehicles, industrial automation, and remote sensing.