Radio-Frequency Digital-to-Analog Converters

Book excerpt: With the proliferation of wireless networks, there is a need for more compact, low-cost, power efficient transmitters that are capable of supporting the various communication standards, including Bluetooth, WLAN, GSM/EDGE, WCDMA and 4G of 3GPP cellular. This book describes a novel idea of RF digital-to-analog converters (RFDAC) and demonstrates how they can realize all-digital, fully-integrated RF transmitters that support all the current multi-mode and multi-band communication standards. With this book the reader will: - Understand the challenges of realizing a universal CMOS RF transmitter - Recognize the design issues and the advantages and disadvantages related to analog and digital transmitter architectures - Master designing an RF transmitter from system level modeling techniques down to circuit designs and their related layout know-hows - Grasp digital polar and I/Q calibration techniques as well as the digital predistortion approaches - Learn how to generate appropriate digital I/Q baseband signals in order to apply them to the test chip and measure the RF-DAC performance. - Highlights the benefits and implementation challenges of software-defined transmitters using CMOS technology - Includes various types of analog and digital RF transmitter architectures for wireless applications - Presents an all-digital polar RFDAC transmitter architecture and describes in detail its implementation - Presents a new all-digital I/Q RFDAC transmitter architecture and its implementation - Provides comprehensive design techniques from system level to circuit level - Introduces several digital predistortion techniques which can be used in RF transmitters - Describes the entire flow of system modeling, circuit simulation, layout techniques and the measurement process