This paper presents a hardware efficient receiver architecture, to be used in low-cost, ultra-high rate 60 GHz wireless communication systems. The receiver utilizes a simple, feed-forward carrier recovery concept, performing phase and frequency synchronization in the analog domain. This enables 1-bit baseband processing without a need of ultra-high speed and high precision analog-to-digital conversion, offering a strong simplification of the system architecture and comparatively low power consumption. In a first prototype implementation, the receiver is realized in a low-cost SiGe technology as two separate ICs: the 60 GHz/5 GHz downconverter, and the intermediate frequency synchronous demodulator. The simple synchronous reception concept is experimentally validated for up to 3.5 Gbit/s data rate, which constituted the limit of the existing experimental setup. Furthermore, the downconverter demonstrates that low-cost technologies (fop/fmax ~ 0.75) can be used to realize short-range data links at 60 GHz, with low-noise amplifiers in a more performant technology as needed.
