Millimeter Wave Wireless Communications

5.9 Sensitivity and Link Budget Analysis for MmWave Radios

Before discussing the individual blocks in a mmWave radio, we take a large-scale view to familiarize the reader with the overall radio system. Fig. 5.44 shows the major blocks in a basic radio. Antennas were discussed in Chapter 4. From the illustration, we see that the major blocks for any radio are the power amplifier (PA), low noise amplifier (LNA), mixer, and voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO). Designs that must meet a spectral mask requirement or perform complex modulation will use a frequency synthesizer such as a phase-locked loop (PLL) in place of a simple VCO, and we briefly discuss PLLs in the sections that follow. Table 1 in [RMGJ11] gives examples of several 60 GHz and mmWave ...