This paper presents an extremely low-profile front-end configuration for a base station at quasi-millimeter wave band. It consists of integrated modules of patch antennas and substrate integrated waveguide filters using two printed circuit boards, and transmitter modules using compact GaAs pHEMT three-dimensional monolithic millimeter-wave integrated circuits. The transmitter modules are located around the integrated modules. This is because the proposed front-end configuration can attain extremely low profile, and band-pass filtering performance at quasi-millimeter wave band. As a demonstration of the proposed configuration, 26-GHz-band 4-by-4 elements front-end module is fabricated and tested. The fabricated module has the thickness of about 1 cm, while that offers the attenuation of more than 30 dB with 2 GHz offset from 26 GHz. The proposed configuration can provide base station that can be effective in offering sub-millimeter wave and millimeter-wave bands broadband services for 5G mobile communications systems.

We present a highly integrated quasi-millimeter-wave receiver MMIC that integrates 22 circuits in a 3 2.3 mm area using three-dimensional MMIC (3D-MMIC) technology. The MMIC achieves low noise (3 dB) and high gain (41 dB) at 26 GHz by using an on-chip image reject filter. It integrates a multiply-by-eight (X8) local oscillator (LO) chain with the IF frequency of the 2.4 GHz band and can use low-cost voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs) and demodulators in a 2–3 GHz frequency band. Multilayer inductors contribute to the miniaturization especially in a 2–12 GHz frequency band. Furthermore, it achieves a high dynamic range by using two step attenuators with a new built-in inverter using an N-channel depression field-effect transistor (FET). The power consumption of the MMIC is only 450 mW.

A highly integrated frequency quadrupler MMIC that uses three-dimensional MMIC (3D-MMIC) technology is presented. It consists of four driver amplifiers, two doublers, and a 2-band elimination filter. These seven circuits are integrated in only a 2.36 mm2 area. The filter sufficiently suppresses spurious output components. The third and fifth harmonic components, which are the spurious components nearest to the desired component, are well suppressed. The desired/undesired ratio is about 40 dB. The driver amplifiers make the quadrupler output a constant power of the desired multiplied signal under low input power. The MMIC supplies +5 dBm of the fourth harmonic component in the input power range from -10 dBm to +5 dBm. The power dissipation of the MMIC is only 160 mW.