K/Ka-Band 4-Element 4-Beam Hybrid Phased-Array Transmitter and Receiver Front-Ends with Compact Layout Floor-Plans and Fault-Tolerant Digital Circuits.

Space-terrestrial networks utilizing low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite constellations have emerged as promising 6G applications. The K-/Ka-bands are allocated with frequencies of 17.7-20.2 GHz and 27.5-30 GHz as transmit and receive bands in the space segment. Due to the limited payload of satellites, fully-connected multi-beam phased-arrays [1] are exploited to improve data rates and spectral efficiency. However, realizing such architectures faces three challenging issues. First, the layout floor-plans are often in complexity, resulting in long interconnects, serious couplings and low area utilization. Second, LEO satellites have limited space and cannot afford large size of the antenna board. To achieve better EIRP and G/T metrics, high output power in the transmitter (TX) and low NF in the receiver (RX) are required. The third issue is that single-event effects (SEE) induced by energetic particles can potentially produce register flips in digital circuits when the ICs are used in space. To overcome these issues, this paper presents K/Ka-band 4-element 4-beam hybrid phased-array TX and RX front-ends. The proposed TX and RX achieve compact and simplified floor-plans, enhanced output power and NF performance, and fault-tolerant serial peripheral interface (SPI).