A delay spread cancelling waveform characterizer for RF power amplifiers

Maikel Huiskamp (Corresponding Author), Anne J. Annema, Bram Nauta

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

    2 Citations (Scopus)
    268 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    A two channel 65 nm CMOS RF-waveform characterizer is presented that enables multi-harmonic Adaptive Matching Networks (AMN) or Adaptive Digital Pre-Distortion (ADPD) in RF-power amplifiers. The characterizer measures the DC component and the first 3 harmonics of RF signals by applying a DFT to 8 (ideally) equally spaced quasi-DC output voltages. Conventionally in these types of systems accuracy is limited by sample timing accuracies, which in our case are mainly due to delay cell mismatch. We introduce a novel way to cancel delay cell mismatch, that significantly increases measurement accuracy at the cost of only a small power and area increase. The RF-waveform characterizer achieves 6.8-bit measurement linearity together with a (clock feedthrough limited) 24 dB SFDR. The measured power consumption for our proof-of-principle demonstrator is 18.6 mW at a maximum input signal frequency of 1.1 GHz under continuous operation.
    Original languageEnglish
    Article number8481701
    Pages (from-to)1834-1838
    Number of pages5
    JournalIEEE transactions on circuits and systems II: express briefs
    Volume65
    Issue number12
    Early online date4 Oct 2018
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Dec 2018

    Keywords

    • Discrete Fourier transform (DFT)
    • Signal sampling
    • Power amplifiers
    • Signal characterization
    • Delay spread cancellation
    • CMOS integrated circuits

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