This paper presents the requirements to achieve data rates beyond 100 Gbit/s in communication systems operating at W-band. The analysis assumes the underlying transmitter system to be implemented as an active antenna array which supports beam steering and polarization multiplexing over large bandwidths to achieve the high data rates. The envisaged technologies for the transceiver front-ends are CMOS for the active circuitry and a stereolithographic process for the integration of the chip sets into active antenna elements. Application scenarios are presented, and a link budget analysis shows the feasibility of the concept for multi-user short-range line-of-sight communications. The required beam steering angles and ranges of operation are taken into account together with the necessary signal-to-noise ratio and modulation order to obtain the minimum number of array elements. Lastly, the frequency dependence of the link budget shows that the performance is limited at the lower W-band. Efforts for performance improvement should thus target this frequency range.
