A Wideband IQ-Mapping Direct-Digital RF Modulator for 5G Transmitters
Yiyu Shen, Rob Bootsman, Morteza S. Alavi, L.C.N. de Vreede
Abstract
This article presents a wideband <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2 \times 12$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -bit direct-digital RF modulator (DDRM) operating in a 0.5-to-3-GHz band for 5G transmitters. The proposed digital Cartesian modulator features an advanced IQ-mapping technique to boost RF power by 3 dB and suppress the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$I/Q$ </tex-math></inline-formula> image. To verify the proposed concept, a 40-nm CMOS prototype is implemented whose RF peak output power at 2 GHz is more than 14 dBm. It achieves an adjacent-channel leakage ratio (ACLR) of −52 dBc and an error vector magnitude (EVM) of −40 dB for a 20-MHz 256-QAM signal at 2.4 GHz. With a 320-MHz 256-QAM signal, the measured ACLR and EVM performances are better than −43 dBc and −32 dB at 2.4 GHz, respectively, without using any digital pre-distortion.