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High-Linearity Wideband Transmitter

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Radio Frequency Integrated Circuit Design for Cognitive Radio Systems

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Abstract

One of the main components of a cognitive radio is the radio frequency (RF) wireless transmitter. Similar to the wireless receiver, the main challenge in RF transmitters is wideband, linear operation. In this chapter, various wideband linear transmitter architectures are reviewed, including direct conversion, polar modulator, and direct digital upconversion transmitter architectures. Digital predistortion techniques to correct for analog impairments in the RF transmitter are addressed. The issue of high linearity and power efficiency in output driver amplifiers is discussed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Intel Corporation, Newport Beach, California, USA

    Amr Fahim

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  1. Amr Fahim
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Correspondence to Amr Fahim .

Summary

Summary

In this chapter, design issues in wideband transmitters have been explored. The requirements of transmitters including EVM, ACPR, and EIRP have been detailed. The simplest transmit architecture, the direct upconverter, has been detailed. The Cartesian loop transmitter has been shown to provide better linearity on the expense of complexity and data bandwidth. Polar modulator architecture, which has gained recent popularity due to its ability to support nonlinear power efficient PAs, has also been detailed.

Special attention has been devoted to direct digital upconverter transmit architectures. This included the digital upconverter filters and upsamplers. It also included an in-depth analysis of DAC design. The concept of DPD as a means to correct for analog impairments has been introduced. Various calibration techniques to correct for nonlinearity as well as image rejection have been given. Finally, various PA topologies have been explored. This included transconductance-based amplifiers, such as class-A, class-B, class-AB, and class-C amplifiers. Switched amplifiers have also been explored, which include class-D, class-E, and class-F amplifiers.

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Fahim, A. (2015). High-Linearity Wideband Transmitter. In: Radio Frequency Integrated Circuit Design for Cognitive Radio Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11011-0_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11011-0_5

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