Adaptive optical feedforward linearization of optical transceiver for radio over fiber communication link

With the tremendous growth in numbers of mobile data subscribers and explosive demand for mobile data, the current wireless access network need to be augmented in order to keep up with the data speed promised by the future generation mobile network standards. Radio over fiber technology (RoF) is a cost effective solution because of its ability to support numerous numbers of simple structured base stations by consolidating the signal processing functions at the central station. RoF systems are analog systems where noise figure and spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) are important parameters in an RoF link. The nonlinearity of a laser transmitter is a major limiting factor to the performance of an RoF link, as it generates spurious spectral components, leading to intermodulation distortions (IMD), which limit the achievable SFDR of the analog RF wave transmissions. The device nonlinearity can be mitigated through various linearization schemes. The feedforward linearization technique offers a number of advantages compared to other techniques, as it offers good suppression of distortion products over a large bandwidth and supports high operating frequencies. On the other hand, feedforward linearization is a relatively sensitive scheme, where its performance is highly influenced by changing operating conditions such as laser aging, temperature effect, and input signal variations. Therefore, for practical implementations the feedforward system has to be real-time adaptive. This thesis aims to develop an adaptive optical feedforward linearization system for radio over fiber links. Mathematical analyses and computer simulations are performed to determine the most efficient algorithm for the adaptive controller for laser transmitter feedforward linearization system. Experimental setup and practical measurement are performed for an adaptive feedforward linearized laser transmitter and its performance is optimized. The adaptive optical feedforward linearization system has been modeled and simulated in MATLAB Simulink. The performances of two adaptive algorithms, which are related to the gradient signal method, such as least mean square (LMS) and recursive least square (RLS) have been compared. The LMS algorithm has been selected because of its robustness and simplicity. Finally, the adaptive optical feedforward linearization system has been set up with digital signal processor (DSP) as the control device, and practical measurement has been performed. The system has achieved a suppression of 14 dB in the third order IMD products over a bandwidth of 30 MHz, in a two-tone measurement at 1.7 GHz

Integrated Filters and Couplers for Next Generation Wireless Tranceivers

The main focus of this thesis is to investigate the critical nonlinear distortion issues affecting RF/Microwave components such as power amplifiers (PA) and develop new and improved solutions that will improve efficiency and linearity of next generation RF/Microwave mobile wireless communication systems. This research involves evaluating the nonlinear distortions in PA for different analog and digital signals which have been a major concern. The second harmonic injection technique is explored and used to effectively suppress nonlinear distortions. This method consists of simultaneously feeding back the second harmonics at the output of the power amplifier (PA) into the input of the PA. Simulated and measured results show improved linearity results. However, for increasing frequency bandwidth, the suppression abilities reduced which is a limitation for 4G LTE and 5G networks that require larger bandwidth (above 5 MHz). This thesis explores creative ways to deal with this major drawback. The injection technique was modified with the aid of a well-designed band-stop filter. The compact narrowband notch filter designed was able to suppress nonlinear distortions very effectively when used before the PA. The notch filter is also integrated in the injection technique for LTE carrier aggregation (CA) with multiple carriers and significant improvement in nonlinear distortion performance was observed. This thesis also considers maximizing efficiency alongside with improved linearity performance. To improve on the efficiency performance of the PA, the balanced PA configuration was investigated. However, another major challenge was that the couplers used in this configuration are very large in size at the desired operating frequency. In this thesis, this problem was solved by designing a compact branch line coupler. The novel coupler was simulated, fabricated and measured with performance comparable to its conventional equivalent and the coupler achieved substantial size reduction over others. The coupler is implemented in the balanced PA configuration giving improved input and output matching abilities. The proposed balanced PA is also implemented in 4G LTE and 5G wireless transmitters. This thesis provides simulation and measured results for all balanced PA cases with substantial efficiency and linearity improvements observed even for higher bandwidths (above 5 MHz). Additionally, the coupler is successfully integrated with rectifiers for improved energy harvesting performance and gave improved RF-dc conversion efficienc

Configurable circuits and their impact on multi-standard RF front-end architectures

This thesis studies configurable circuits and their impact on multi-standard RF front-end architectures. In particular, low-voltage low-power linear LNA and mixer topologies suitable for implementation in multi-standard front-ends are subject of the investigation. With respect to frequency and bandwidth, multi-standard front-ends can be implemented using either tunable or wideband LNA and mixer topologies. Based on the type of the LNA and mixer(s), multi-standard receiver RF front-ends can be divided into three groups. They can be (tunable) narrow-band, wide-band or combined. The advantages and disadvantages of the different multi-standard receiver RF front-ends have been discussed in detail. The partitioning between off-chip selectivity, on-chip selectivity provided by the LNA and mixer, linearity, power consumption and occupied chip area in each multi-standard RF front-end group are thoroughly investigated. A Figure of Merit (FOM) for the multi-standard receiver RF front-end has been introduced. Based on this FOM the most suitable multi-standard RF front-end group in terms of cost-effectiveness can be selected. In order to determine which multi-standard RF front-end group is the most cost-effective for a practical application, a GSM850/E-GSM/DCS/PCS/Bluetooth/WLANa/b/g multi-standard receiver RF front-end is chosen as a demonstrator. These standards are the most frequently used standards in wireless communication, and this combination of standards allows to users almost "anytime-anywhere" voice and data transfer. In order to verify these results, three demonstrators have been defined, designed and implemented, two wideband RF front-end circuits in 90nm CMOS and 65nm CMOS, and one combined multi-standard RF front-end circuit in 65nm CMOS. The proposed multi-standard demonstrators have been compared with the state-of the art narrow-band, wide-band and combined multi-standard RF front-ends. On the proposed multi-standard RF front-ends and the state-of the art multi-standard RF front-ends the proposed FOM have been applied. The comparison shows that the combined multi-standard RF front-end group is the most cost effective multi-standard group for this application

Kokeellinen taajuusmuunnin DVB-T -lähettimeen

Kiinnostus digitaalisen televisiolähetteen vastaanottamiseen matkaviestimillä on lisääntynyt viime vuosina. Euroopalaista DVB-T -digitaalitelevisiostandardia viimeistellessä perustettiin ad-hoc ryhmä DVB-X tutkimaan, miten standardia voitaisiin muuttaa, jotta liikkuva vastaanotto olisi mahdollista. Samaan aikaan langattomien lähiverkkojen käyttö on lisääntynyt huomattavasti, joten viestintäviranomaiset ovat varanneet uusia taajuuskaistoja mikroaaltotaajuuksilta näiden käyttöön. Koska uuden sukupolven langattomien lähiverkkojen standardi HiperLAN/2 ja digitaalitelevisiostandardi DVB-T käyttävät samankaltaista OFDM-lähetystekniikkaa, yhdistämällä lähiverkkojen kaupalliset RF osat ja DVB-T lähete on mahdollista toteuttaa mikroaaltotaajuuksilla toimiva digitaalitelevisiolähetin. Diplomityössä esitetään ratkaisu, jossa UHF-taajuuksinen digitaalitelevisiolähete nostetaan taajuusmuuntimella 5,8 GHz ISM-kaistalle. Jotta muuntimen kriittisten osien sekä taajuusmuunnoksen ongelmat voitaisiin ratkoa, työssä esitetään lyhyt kertaus DVB-T -tekniikan tärkeimpiin alueisiin. Läpikäymällä viimeaikaisia radioaaltojen etenemismallien mittauskampanjoita alan kirjallisuudesta sekä vastaanottoalueen kartoistus, todetaan linkkibudjettilaskelmalla, että tarvittava lähetysteho on noin 10 W EIRP. Koska vastaanottoalue on kapea, lähetinantenni vahvistaa signaalia 20 dB. Tällöin DVB-T -lähettimen vaatimuksiin kuuluva lineaarinen vahvistin toteutetaan käyttämällä ylimitoitettua 1 W tehovahvistinta 10 dB alle sen maksimitehon. Työssä käsitellään myös muita tapoja linearisoida tehovahvistin, jotta backoff:n käyttö voidaan perustella. Jotta rakennetun taajuusmuuntimen suorituskykyä voitaisiin arvioida, diplomityön loppupuolella esitellään eri mittausmenetelmiä sekä VTT:n Otadigi-lähettimen signaalin voimakkuuden mittauksen tulokset. Mittaustuloksien avulla voidaan myös arvioida, millainen taajuusmuunnin on järkevä toteuttaa

Digital Pre-distortion for Interference Reduction in Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks

Given the ever increasing reliance of today’s society on ubiquitous wireless access, the paradigm of dynamic spectrum access (DSA) as been proposed and implemented for utilizing the limited wireless spectrum more efficiently. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is growing in popularity for adoption into wireless services employing DSA frame- work, due to its high bandwidth efficiency and resiliency to multipath fading. While these advantages have been proven for many wireless applications, including LTE-Advanced and numerous IEEE wireless standards, one potential drawback of OFDM or its non-contiguous variant, NC-OFDM, is that it exhibits high peak-to-average power ratios (PAPR), which can induce in-band and out-of-band (OOB) distortions when the peaks of the waveform enter the compression region of the transmitter power amplifier (PA). Such OOB emissions can interfere with existing neighboring transmissions, and thereby severely deteriorate the reliability of the DSA network. A performance-enhancing digital pre-distortion (DPD) technique compensating for PA and in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) modulator distortions is proposed in this dissertation. Al- though substantial research efforts into designing DPD schemes have already been presented in the open literature, there still exists numerous opportunities to further improve upon the performance of OOB suppression for NC-OFDM transmission in the presence of RF front-end impairments. A set of orthogonal polynomial basis functions is proposed in this dissertation together with a simplified joint DPD structure. A performance analysis is presented to show that the OOB emissions is reduced to approximately 50 dBc with proposed algorithms employed during NC-OFDM transmission. Furthermore, a novel and intuitive DPD solution that can minimize the power regrowth at any pre-specified frequency in the spurious domain is proposed in this dissertation. Conventional DPD methods have been proven to be able to effectively reduce the OOB emissions that fall on top of adjacent channels. However more spectral emissions in more distant frequency ranges are generated by employing such DPD solutions, which are potentially in violation of the spurious emission limit. At the same time, the emissions in adjacent channel must be kept under the OOB limit. To the best of the author’s knowledge, there has not been extensive research conducted on this topic. Mathematical derivation procedures of the proposed algorithm are provided for both memoryless nonlinear model and memory-based nonlinear model. Simulation results show that the proposed method is able to provide a good balance of OOB emissions and emissions in the far out spurious domain, by reducing the spurious emissions by 4-5 dB while maintaining the adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) improvement by at least 10 dB, comparing to the PA output spectrum without any DPD

High Linearity Millimeter Wave Power Amplifiers with Novel Linearizer Techniques

Millimeter-wave communications have experienced phenomenal growth in recent years when limited frequency spectrum is occupied by the ever-developing communication services. The power amplifier, as the key component in the transmitter/receiver module of communication systems, affects performance of the whole system directly and receives much attention. For minimized distortion and optimum system performance, the non-constant en- velope modulation schemes used in communication systems have challenging requirements on linearity. As linearity is related to communication quality directly, several linearization techniques, such as predistortion and feedforward, are applied to power amplifier design. Predistortion method has the advantages over other techniques in relatively simple struc- ture and reasonable linearity improvement. But current predistortion circuits have quite limited performance improvement and relatively large insertion loss, which indicate the need for further research. In most of millimeter-wave amplifier design, great effort has been spent on output power or gain, while linearity is often ignored. As almost all the predistortion circuits operate at the RF frequencies, the linearized millimeter-wave com- munication circuit is still relatively immature and very challenging. This project is dedicated to solve the linearity problem faced by millimeter-wave power amplifier in communication systems, which lacks of e®ective techniques in this field. Linearity improvement with the predistortion method will be the key issue in this project and some original ideas for predistortion circuit design will be applied to millimeter-wave amplifiers. In this thesis, several predistortion circuits with novel structure were proposed, which provide a new approach for linearity improvement for millimeter-wave power am- plifier. A millimeter-wave power ampli¯er for LMDS applications built on GaAs pHEMT technology was developed to a high engineering standard, which works as the test bench for linearization. Actual operation and parasitic elements at tens of gigahertz have been taken into consideration during the design. Firstly, two novel predistorter structures based on the amplifier were proposed, one is based on an amplifier with a fixed bias circuit and the other is based on an amplifier with a nonlinear signal dependant bias circuit. These novel structures can improve the linearity while improving other metrics simultaneously, which can effectively solve the problem of insertion loss faced by the conventional structures. Besides this, an original predistortion circuit design methodology derived from frequency to signal amplitude transformation was proposed. Based on this methodology, several transfer functions were proposed and related predistortion circuits were built to linearize the power amplifier. As this methodology is quite different from the traditional approach, it can improve the linearity signifficantly while other metrics are affected slightly and has a broad prospect for application

High Linearity Millimeter Wave Power Amplifiers with Novel Linearizer Techniques

Millimeter-wave communications have experienced phenomenal growth in recent years when limited frequency spectrum is occupied by the ever-developing communication services. The power amplifier, as the key component in the transmitter/receiver module of communication systems, affects performance of the whole system directly and receives much attention. For minimized distortion and optimum system performance, the non-constant en- velope modulation schemes used in communication systems have challenging requirements on linearity. As linearity is related to communication quality directly, several linearization techniques, such as predistortion and feedforward, are applied to power amplifier design. Predistortion method has the advantages over other techniques in relatively simple struc- ture and reasonable linearity improvement. But current predistortion circuits have quite limited performance improvement and relatively large insertion loss, which indicate the need for further research. In most of millimeter-wave amplifier design, great effort has been spent on output power or gain, while linearity is often ignored. As almost all the predistortion circuits operate at the RF frequencies, the linearized millimeter-wave com- munication circuit is still relatively immature and very challenging. This project is dedicated to solve the linearity problem faced by millimeter-wave power amplifier in communication systems, which lacks of e®ective techniques in this field. Linearity improvement with the predistortion method will be the key issue in this project and some original ideas for predistortion circuit design will be applied to millimeter-wave amplifiers. In this thesis, several predistortion circuits with novel structure were proposed, which provide a new approach for linearity improvement for millimeter-wave power am- plifier. A millimeter-wave power ampli¯er for LMDS applications built on GaAs pHEMT technology was developed to a high engineering standard, which works as the test bench for linearization. Actual operation and parasitic elements at tens of gigahertz have been taken into consideration during the design. Firstly, two novel predistorter structures based on the amplifier were proposed, one is based on an amplifier with a fixed bias circuit and the other is based on an amplifier with a nonlinear signal dependant bias circuit. These novel structures can improve the linearity while improving other metrics simultaneously, which can effectively solve the problem of insertion loss faced by the conventional structures. Besides this, an original predistortion circuit design methodology derived from frequency to signal amplitude transformation was proposed. Based on this methodology, several transfer functions were proposed and related predistortion circuits were built to linearize the power amplifier. As this methodology is quite different from the traditional approach, it can improve the linearity signifficantly while other metrics are affected slightly and has a broad prospect for application