A 0.35-to-2.6GHz multilevel outphasing transmitter with a digital interpolating phase modulator enabling up to 400MHz instantaneous bandwidth

Abstract

Advanced wireless radio standards set stringent requirements on the bandwidth, frequency range and reconfigurability of base-station transmitters. Recently, the outphasing concept has shown promise of wide bandwidth while taking advantage of process scaling with extensive exploitation of rail-to-rail signaling. Recent outphasing transmitter designs have often focused on power-amplifier (PA) and power-combiner implementations while omitting the phase modulator [1,2]. Moreover, previously reported transmitters with integrated digital phase modulators have only shown bandwidths up to 40MHz [3,4], although 133MHz has been demonstrated at 10GHz carrier frequency utilizing phase modulators based on conventional IQ-DACs [5]. Thus, digital-intensive outphasing transmitters capable of modulation with hundreds of MHz bandwidth at existing cellular frequency bands have not yet been published. To address the aforementioned challenge, this paper introduces a multilevel outphasing transmitter with four amplitude levels, including the first prototype implementation based on the digital interpolating phase modulator concept [6]. The transmitter is targeted for 5G picocell base stations and has been verified to operate with instantaneous bandwidth up to 400MHz. In addition, the developed phase modulator eliminates the need for complex on-chip frequency synthesizers by introducing digital carrier frequency generation, demonstrated between 0.35 and 2.6GHz, while utilizing a single 1.8GHz reference clock.