An ISAC-ready Full-Duplex Backscatter Architecture for the mmWave IoT

Abstract: Achieving long-range, high-rate, concurrent two-way mmWave communication with power-constrained IoT devices is fundamental to scaling future ubiquitous sensing systems, yet the substantial power demands and high cost of mmWave hardware have long stood in the way of practical deployment. This paper presents the first mmWave full-duplex backscatter tag architecture, charting a genuinely low-cost path toward high-performance mmWave connectivity and localization for ISAC systems. The proposed tag operates at ranges beyond 45m on the uplink and beyond 200m on the downlink, delivering 20x the reach of state-of-the-art systems while being over 100x cheaper than existing mmWave backscatter platforms. Enabling this leap is a novel low-power regenerative amplifier that provides 30 dB of gain while consuming only 30 mW, paired with a regenerative rectifier that achieves state-of-the-art sensitivity down to -60 dBm. We integrate our circuits on a compact PCB and evaluate it across diverse uplink and downlink scenarios, where it achieves an downlink BER of $10^{-1}$ at 200 meters and a uplink BER of $10^{-2}$ at 45 meters, demonstrating resilient, high-quality communication even at extended ranges.