Digital Radio Encoding and Power Amplifier Design for Multimode and Multiband Wireless Communications

The evolution of wireless technology has necessitated the support of multiple communication standards by mobile devices. At present, multiple chipsets/radios operating at predefined sets of modulation schemes, frequency bands, bandwidths and output power levels are used to achieve this objective. This leads to higher component counts, increased cost and limits the capacity to cope with future communication standards. In order to tackle different wireless standards using a single chipset, digital circuits have been increasingly deployed in radios and demonstrated re-configurability in different modulation schemes (multimode) and frequency bands (multiband). Despite efforts and progress made in digitizing the entire radio, the power amplifier (PA) is still designed using an conventional approach and has become the bottleneck in digital transmitters, in terms of low average power efficiency, poor compatibility with modern CMOS technology and limited re-configurability. This research addresses these issues from two aspects. The first half of the thesis investigates signal encoding issues between the modulator and PA. We propose, analyze and evaluate a new hybrid amplitude/time signal encoding scheme that significantly improves the coding efficiency and dynamic range of a digitally modulated power amplifier (DMPA) without significantly increasing design complexity. The proposed hybrid amplitude/time encoding scheme combines both the amplitude domain and the time domain to optimally encode information. Experimental results show that hybrid amplitude/time encoding results in a 35% increase in the average coding efficiency with respect to conventional time encoding, and is only 6.7% lower than peak efficiency when applied to a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) signal with a peak to average power ratio equal to 9.9 dB. A new DMPA architecture, based on the proposed hybrid encoding, is also proposed. The second half of this thesis presents the design, analysis and implementation of a CMOS PA that is amenable to the proposed hybrid encoding scheme. A multi-way current mode class-D PA architecture has been proposed and realized in 130 nm CMOS technology. The designed PA has satisfied the objectives of wide bandwidth (1.5 GHz - 2.7 GHz at 1 dB output power), and high efficiency (PAE 63%) in addition to demonstrating linear responses using the proposed digital encoding. A complete digital transmitter combining the encoder and the multi-way PA was also investigated. The overall efficiency is 27% modulating 7.3 dB peak to average power ratio QAM signals

CMOS Data Converters for Closed-Loop mmWave Transmitters

With the increased amount of data consumed in mobile communication systems, new solutions for the infrastructure are needed. Massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) is seen as a key enabler for providing this increased capacity. With the use of a large number of transmitters, the cost of each transmitter must be low. Closed-loop transmitters, featuring high-speed data converters is a promising option for achieving this reduced unit cost.In this thesis, both digital-to-analog (D/A) and analog-to-digital (A/D) converters suitable for wideband operation in millimeter wave (mmWave) massive MIMO transmitters are demonstrated. A 2 76 bit radio frequency digital-to-analog converter (RF-DAC)-based in-phase quadrature (IQ) modulator is demonstrated as a compact building block, that to a large extent realizes the transmit path in a closed-loop mmWave transmitter. The evaluation of an successive-approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is also presented in this thesis. Methods for connecting simulated and measured performance has been studied in order to achieve a better understanding about the alternating comparator topology.These contributions show great potential for enabling closed-loop mmWave transmitters for massive MIMO transmitter realizations

Concurrent Multi-Band Envelope Tracking Power Amplifiers for Emerging Wireless Communications

Emerging wireless communication is shifting toward data-centric broadband services, resulting in employment of sophisticated and spectrum efficient modulation and access techniques. This yields communication signals with large peak-to-average power ratios (PAPR) and stringent linearity requirements. For example, future wireless communication standard, such as long term evolution advanced (LTE-A) require adoption of carrier aggregation techniques to improve their effective modulation bandwidth. The carrier aggregation technique for LTE-A incorporates multiple carriers over a wide frequency range to create a wider bandwidth of up to 100MHz. This will require future power amplifiers (PAs) and transmitters to efficiently amplify concurrent multi-band signals with large PAPR, while maintaining good linearity. Different back-off efficiency enhancement techniques are available, such as envelope tracking (ET) and Doherty. ET has gained a lot of attention recently as it can be applied to both base station and mobile transmitters. Unfortunately, few publications have investigated concurrent multi-band amplification using ET PAs, mainly due to the limited bandwidth of the envelope amplifier. In this thesis, a novel approach to enable concurrent amplification of multi-band signals using a single ET PA will be presented. This thesis begins by studying the sources of nonlinearities in single-band and dual-band PAs. Based on the analysis, a design methodology is proposed to reduce the sources of memory effects in single-band and dual-band PAs from the circuit design stage and improve their linearizability. Using the proposed design methodology, a 45W GaN PA was designed. The PA was linearized using easy to implement, memoryless digital pre-distortion (DPD) with 8 and 28 coefficients when driven with single-band and dual-band signals, respectively. This analysis and design methodology will enable the design of PAs with reduced memory effects, which can be linearized using simple, power efficient linearization techniques, such as lookup table or memoryless polynomial DPD. Note that the power dissipation of the linearization engine becomes crucial as we move toward smaller base station cells, such as femto- and pico-cells, where complicated DPD models cannot be implemented due to their significant power overhead. This analysis is also very important when implementing a multi-band ET PA system, where the sources of memory effects in the PA itself are minimized through the proposed design methodology. Next, the principle of concurrent dual-band ET operation using the low frequency component (LFC) of the envelope of the dual-band signal is presented. The proposed dual-band ET PA modulates the drain voltage of the PA using the LFC of the envelope of the dual-band signal. This will enable concurrent dual-band operation of the ET PA without posing extra bandwidth requirements on the envelope amplifier. A detailed efficiency and linearity analysis of the dual-band ET PA is also presented. Furthermore, a new dual-band DPD model with supply dependency is proposed in this thesis, capable of capturing and compensating for the sources of distortion in the dual-band ET PA. To the best of our knowledge, concurrent dual-band operation of ET PAs using the LFC of the envelope of the dual-band signal is presented for the first time in the literature. The proposed dual-band ET operation is validated using the measurement results of two GaN ET PA prototypes. Lastly, the principle of concurrent dual-band ET operation is extended to multi-band signals using the LFC of the envelope of the multi-band signal. The proposed multi-band ET operation is validated using the measurement results of a tri-band ET PA. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reported tri-band ET PA in literature. The tri-band ET PA is linearized using a new tri-band DPD model with supply dependency

RF Power Amplifier and Its Envelope Tracking

This dissertation introduces an agile supply modulator with optimal transient performance for the envelope tracking supply in linear power amplifiers. For this purpose, an on-demand current source module, the bang-bang transient performance enhancer (BBTPE), is proposed. Its objective is to follow fast variations in input signals with reduced overshoot and settling time without deteriorating the steady-state performance of the buck regulator. The proposed approach enables fast system response through the BBTPE and an accurate steady-state output response through a low switching ripple and power efficient dynamic buck regulator. Fast output response with the help of the added module induces a slower rise of inductor current in the buck converter that further assists the proposed system to reduce both overshoot and settling time. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed solution, extensive simulations and experimental results from a discrete system are reported. The proposed supply modulator shows 80% improvement in rise time along with 60% reduction in both overshoot and settling time compared to the conventional dynamic buck regulator-based solution. Experimental results for a PA using the LTE 16-QAM 5 MHz standard shows improvement of 7.68 dB and 65.1% in ACPR and EVM, respectively. In a polar power amplifier, the input signal splits into phase and amplitude components using a non-linear conversion operation. This operation broadens the spectrum of the polar signal components. The information of amplitude and phase contains spectral images due to the sampling operation in non-linear conversion operation. These spectral images can be large and cause out-of-band emission in the output spectrum. In addition, during the recombination process of phase and amplitude, a delay mismatch between amplitude and phase signals, which can occur due to separate processing paths of amplitude and phase signals, causes out-of-band emissions, also known as spectral regrowth. This dissertation presents solutions to both of the issues of digital polar power amplifier: spectral images and delay mismatch. In order to reduce the problem of spectral images, interpolation of phase and amplitude is proposed in this work. This increases the effective sampling frequency of the amplitude and phase, which helps to improve the linearity by around 10 dB. In addition, a novel calibration scheme is proposed here for the delay mismatch between phase and amplitude path in a digital polar power amplifier. The scheme significantly reduces the spectral regrowth. The scheme uses the same path for phase and amplitude delay calculation after the recombination that allows having a robust calibration. Furthermore, it can be executed during the empty transmission slots. The proposed scheme is designed in a 40 nm CMOS technology and simulated with a 64-QAM IEEE 802.11n wireless standard. The scheme achieved 7.57 dB enhancement in ACLR and 84.35% improvement in EVM for a 3.5 ns mismatch in phase and amplitude path