A Solid-State Regenerative Repeater for Guided Millimeter-Wave Communication Systems

l.i Guided Millimeter-Wave Communication Systems High-speed, long-haul communication by means of millimeter waves transmitted in the circular-electric mode in a multimode circular waveguide was described by S. E. Miller 1 in 1954. Recent advances in solidstate devices for generating millimeter waves as well as advances in circuit design for the IF and baseband portions of the repeaters have renewed interest in such a system. The purpose of this paper is to describe the design and performance of an experimental all solid-state millimeter-wave repeater which has recently been built and tested. It operates at a carrier frequency of 51.7 GHz and transmits binary PCM at a 306 M b / s rate. The experimental repeater includes all of the active circuitry for one channel of 1977 1988 T H E BELL SYSTEM T E C H N I C A L J O U R N A L , NOVEMBER l i » C » T a complete repeater and contains channel filters representative of those needed to separate and combine the many channels of an actual system. It was built to demonstrate certain principles and no attempt is made here to describe or design a complete system. Certain system considerations arc discussed in Section IV in order to give the reader some perspective concerning those factors which influenced the design of the repeater. In section II, we discuss a modulation scheme which was conceived to satisfy the requirement imposed by the nature of the system. The circuitry used in the repeater is discussed in Section III. Particular emphasis is placed on those portions of the circuit which the authors feel represent a significant advance in the state of the art.