Noise consideration of radio receivers using silicon technologies towards 6G communication

Silicon technologies have been the dominant approach to implement radio frequency transceivers up to 5G systems with need for simplified antenna interface in large scale antenna arrays at mm wave region. Recent interests to achieve data rates up to 1 Tbps call for higher carrier frequencies to achieve sufficient bandwidth. Frequencies above 100~GHz will pose serious challenges to silicon based implementations as speed of the transistor in practical designs will not scale up similarly as typically expected in digital signal processing. It’s impacting not only the achievable gain but also on noise of the transistor that directly scales up as a function of frequency impacting the link range. This paper presents specifically behaviour of noise parameter as a function of frequency in transistor level and in simulated low noise amplifiers using state-of-the-art CMOS SOI and SiGe BiCMOS technologies. It will be shown how noise parameter should be considered when evaluating achievable link ranges as a function of the frequency.