As in most RF circuits, the design of transmitters for advanced mobile communication systems is dominated by the tradeoff between cost and performance. While the former claims ever-smaller footprints and bill of materials (BOM), the latter comprises a stringent set of requirements regarding power consumption, signal integrity and out-of-band noise emission. Analog-intensive architectures [1,2] typically deliver the best noise performance at the cost of intensive lowpass filtering, hence increasing area consumption with bulky reconstruction filters. The digital transmitters [3-5], on the other hand, are significantly more portable and area efficient, but they typically fall short in terms of out-of-band noise and spurious emission. A charge-based architecture was presented in [6], using incremental signaling in a switched-capacitance architecture to provide intrinsic noise-filtering capabilities with small power and area consumption. This work presents a transmitter architecture that leverages the incremental-charge-based operation by using power-efficient resistive DACs to deliver charge directly to the 50Ω output RF load, omitting the need for a PA driver stage, in a complete digital-intensive architecture. With a peak output power of 3.5dBm, the presented work achieves -159dBc/Hz at 45MHz offset from both 900MHz and 2.4GHz modulated carriers, with an EVM performance of -36dB for a 64-QAM modulated signal.
Paro Filho, PE, Ingels, M, Wambacq, P & Craninckx, J 2016, A 0.22mm2 CMOS resistive charge-based direct-launch digital transmitter with -159dBc/Hz out-of-band noise. in Solid-State Circuits Conference Digest of Technical Papers (ISSCC)., 13.7, IEEE, pp. 250-252, 2016 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), San Francisco, United States, 31/01/16. https://doi.org/10.1109/ISSCC.2016.7418001
Paro Filho, P. E., Ingels, M., Wambacq, P., & Craninckx, J. (2016). A 0.22mm2 CMOS resistive charge-based direct-launch digital transmitter with -159dBc/Hz out-of-band noise. In Solid-State Circuits Conference Digest of Technical Papers (ISSCC) (pp. 250-252). Article 13.7 IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ISSCC.2016.7418001
@inproceedings{8b8e5b73b6f740b9baaa94b2ebc4fd55,
title = "A 0.22mm2 CMOS resistive charge-based direct-launch digital transmitter with -159dBc/Hz out-of-band noise",
abstract = "As in most RF circuits, the design of transmitters for advanced mobile communication systems is dominated by the tradeoff between cost and performance. While the former claims ever-smaller footprints and bill of materials (BOM), the latter comprises a stringent set of requirements regarding power consumption, signal integrity and out-of-band noise emission. Analog-intensive architectures [1,2] typically deliver the best noise performance at the cost of intensive lowpass filtering, hence increasing area consumption with bulky reconstruction filters. The digital transmitters [3-5], on the other hand, are significantly more portable and area efficient, but they typically fall short in terms of out-of-band noise and spurious emission. A charge-based architecture was presented in [6], using incremental signaling in a switched-capacitance architecture to provide intrinsic noise-filtering capabilities with small power and area consumption. This work presents a transmitter architecture that leverages the incremental-charge-based operation by using power-efficient resistive DACs to deliver charge directly to the 50Ω output RF load, omitting the need for a PA driver stage, in a complete digital-intensive architecture. With a peak output power of 3.5dBm, the presented work achieves -159dBc/Hz at 45MHz offset from both 900MHz and 2.4GHz modulated carriers, with an EVM performance of -36dB for a 64-QAM modulated signal.",
author = "{Paro Filho}, {Pedro Emiliano} and Mark Ingels and Piet Wambacq and Jan Craninckx",
year = "2016",
month = feb,
doi = "10.1109/ISSCC.2016.7418001",
language = "English",
isbn = "978-1-4673-9466-6",
pages = "250--252",
booktitle = "Solid-State Circuits Conference Digest of Technical Papers (ISSCC)",
publisher = "IEEE",
note = "2016 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) ; Conference date: 31-01-2016",
}