SUEMATSU-Yasuharu Award 2014

SUEMATSU-Yasuharu Award

CMOS Millimeter-wave Wireless Transceiver

Kenichi Okada

  We are pleased that Dr. Kenichi Okada has won the first Yasuharu Suematsu Award. As a result of the explosive growth of mobile communication in the last decade, the capacity of wireless communication is expected to become 1000 times higher than that at the present time. According to the Shannon theorem, the wireless communication data rate is limited by the frequency bandwidth. Thus, it is very difficult to extend the data rate using a lower carrier frequency such as below 6GHz. Consequently, the use of the millimeter-wave spectrum is seriously expected.

  Conventional millimeter-wave transceivers mainly employ a simple OOK (on-off keying) modulation. One of the major issues in the OOK scheme is lower spectrum efficiency, which results in a lower data rate. The major reason why phase modulation is difficult in conventional OOK transceivers is the poor phase-noise performance in the millimeter-wave frequency range. Phase noise is degraded in proportion to the square of the carrier frequency.

  This prize winner invented a millimeter-wave local oscillator architecture, which uses an injection-locking technique and can significantly improve phase noise. Compared with conventional oscillators, a 20dB phase-noise improvement is achieved. With the use of this local oscillator, the world's first 16QAM direct-conversion transceiver was demonstrated in the millimeter-wave frequency band in 2011. In 2012, the world's first 16QAM transceiver supporting 4 channels defined in the IEEE Wireless Standard was also demonstrated. In 2014, the latest-developed millimeter-wave transceiver achieved the world's first 64QAM wireless communication as well as a 28-Gbps data rate by using 4-channel bonding.

  Many universities and companies are working toward developing a millimeter-wave transceiver, and competition is very tough. In such a situation, this prize winner has been achieving the record-breaking performance every year, and the performance remains at the highest position. In addition, a joint project for commercial production has been started, which can be appreciated as well as the academic achievement. In the near future, the research achievement will be widely applied to 5G (5th generation) mobile communication.

  As described above, this research achievement can be highly appreciated since it has established a new circuit architecture for extending the data rate of millimeter-wave transceivers.
The Yasuharu Suematsu Award is expecting the winner’s larger contributions in future electronics, communication and information. Integrated circuit technology is now facing a turning point from the technological and industrial viewpoints. We hope Dr. Kenichi Okada will continue his work as well as explore and challenge the new technical fields.