Wireless millimeter-wave backplane for microwave phased arrays using bond-wire antennas

Wireless interconnects are an interesting alternative for conventional hard-wired solutions and have already been proposed in literature. We propose to also use them to replace the traditional hard-wired backplane of wide-band phased-array systems with digital beamforming. For this, bond-wire antennas (BWAs) can be used, since they combine high performance with low cost. Moreover, they can be directly bonded on the transceiver integrated circuits (ICs). A computationally efficient model is introduced to compute the coupling between BWAs, which can be used in mainstream IC design tools and libraries. The accuracy is confirmed by measurements of fabricated prototypes. The results of our analysis show that a 60 GHz, 5 Gb/s, wireless backplane is already feasible for phased-arrays operating at C-band