Emerging Digital Transmitters for Wireless Communication From RF to mm-Wave (video)

The increasing demand of wireless communication systems with high integration level, low cost, multi-band, low power consumption, and high data-rate brings challenge for the transmitters design. Advanced CMOS technologies enable direct bits-to-RF conversion, which provides higher energy-efficiency, less stages with impedance matching, compact size, highly reconfigurable nature, and high compatibility with digital baseband, comparing to conventional analog transmitters. Various emerging digital transmitter (DTX) architectures and techniques are developed for wireless communication, demonstrating the benefits such as multifunction, multi-mode, efficiency boosting for high peak to average power ratio (PAPR) modulations, high data-rate, etc. This presentation discusses techniques of DTX operating from RF to mm-wave with continuous evolution of performance metrics, multi-functions, and digital beamforming. This presentation will first introduce the fundamentals of DTX, such as polar/quadrature DTX architectures, system level design considerations, performance trend, etc. Then, the presentation will focus on RF DTX architectures with deep back-off efficiency, bandwidth, and linearity enhancement. Several design examples will be discussed. The mm-wave DTXs for 5G FR2 and E-band wireless communication with data-rate enhancement and LO leakage suppression will be introduced. Furthermore, we will also explore architectures of digital phased-array TXs with high resolution and energy-efficiency beam-steering.