A 660 MHz–5 GHz 6-Phase/3-Phase Transmitter With Cancellation of Counter-Intermodulation Distortion and Improved Image Rejection

Abstract

In the transmit signal path of a cellular terminal that supports the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) standard, the third-order counter-intermodulation (CIM3) product can be a significant contributor to spurious emissions in protected bands, primarily in cases where all the transmit power is concentrated in one resource block at the edge of the allocated bandwidth. This problem can be addressed with a harmonic rejection architecture for the up-conversion mixer in the transceiver. Prior work in this area retains the four-phase baseband inputs of a conventional quadrature mixer, utilizes various techniques in the local oscillator (LO) path involving overlapping LO waveforms to suppress harmonics and requires the digitally-controlled oscillator (DCO) to be operated at two or more times the LO frequency. The harmonic rejection architecture presented in this paper has six baseband phases and six non-overlapping LO phases and, for higher-frequency bands, allows the DCO to run at 1.5 times the LO frequency. It also provides an inherently higher uncalibrated image rejection than architectures with quadrature baseband inputs, which is advantageous for any wireless communication standard that supports higher-order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) schemes such as 1024-QAM and 4096-QAM.