A 28-GHz Full-Duplex Phased Array Front-End Using Two Cross-Polarized Arrays and a Canceller

This article proposes a 28-GHz full-duplex (FD) phased arrays, which consists of 64-element transmitting and receiving arrays, and a 28-GHz radio frequency (RF) canceller. The phased arrays are designed with 2times 2 beamformer chips, and the transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) arrays are oriented to have cross polarized configurations for high isolation. The 28-GHz RF canceller is based on an identical 2times 2 beamformer chip with two external different delay taps. Since the canceller is located at the input and output ports of arrays instead of antennas, it cannot eliminate the nonlinearities and noises in the phased arrays. Therefore, these nonlinearities and noise in the TX and RX arrays are experimentally analyzed to demonstrate that the proposed cross-polarized arrays have enough isolation to achieve suppression to the level of the RX noise floor. The FD phased-array system at 28.5-29.5 GHz has 57-dB isolation between the TX input and RX output ports, where the cross-polarization improves 10-dB isolation comparing to co-polarization and the RF canceller provide additional 10-dB self-interference (SI) suppression. Also, the nonlinearities and noise components of the received SI signals are lower than the noise floor at the output of the RX array. The system requires only 15.5-dB of additional digital cancellation to reduce the SI to the RX noise floor of 1-GHz bandwidth while maintaining the transmitting EIRP at 41 dBm.