Digitally Equalized CMOS Transmitter Front-End With Integrated Power Amplifier

An energy-efficient, 3.5-GHz, direct-conversion RF transmitter with integrated 23-dBm, Class-B power amplifier (PA) is fabricated in a 0.13-μm CMOS process for the reliable transmission of 20-MHz bandwidth OFDM signals. Assisted by an integrated feedback path, a two-dimensional, digital look-up table (2-D LUT) adapted by complex gradient-descent algorithms compensates for the I/Q mismatch and memoryless nonlinearities of the whole transmit path, including the severe amplitude and phase distortions of the on-chip PA. Fifth-order Butterworth transmit filters with 34-MHz cutoff frequency sufficiently attenuate the aliases of the 80-MS/s digital-to-analog converters (DACs), while retaining high in-band fidelity without corrupting the predistorted signal. When a 20-MHz, 64-QAM OFDM signal with 9.6-dB peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) was transmitted, the measured average drain efficiency (DE) of the PA was 12.5% at 9.6-dB back-off and 17.5% at 7-dB back-off, and the corresponding error-vector magnitude (EVM) was measured to be - 29.6 dB and - 26.3 dB with equalization, respectively. A peak DE of 55% and a 25-dBm saturated output power were also measured for the same PA in a stand-alone package.