OFDM Transmission over a Short-Range 240 GHz Wireless Link: Performance Analysis

Abstract:
This paper presents experiments over a short-range wireless link at 240 GHz leveraging a homodyne-type radio-frequency (RF) chipset with on-chip antennas designed in a 130 nm SiGe BiCMOS technology. Unlike the previous work in this frequency range, an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation with zero-forcing equalization is used for performance evaluation. The OFDM signal processor is fully implemented in MATLAB and used for a set of hardwarein- the-loop experiments, assessing the link performance in terms of signal-to-noise ratio, error vector magnitude and bit error rate. The results show that with increasing the signaling rate, the performance declines, as expected, where one of the deterioration factors is the noise amplification due to the used equalization approach.