Power‐efficient aliasing‐free PWM transmitter

Abstract

Linearity and efficiency are important parameters in determining the performance of any wireless transmitter. Pulse-width modulation (PWM) based transmitters offer high efficiency but suffer from low linearity due to image and aliasing distortions. Although the problem of linearity can be addressed by using an aliasing-free PWM (AF-PWM), these transmitters have a lower efficiency as they can only use linear power amplifiers (PAs). Moreover, an all-digital implementation of such transmitters is not possible. The aliasing-compensated PWM transmitter (AC-PWMT) has a higher efficiency due to the use of switch-mode PAs (SMPAs) but uses outphasing to eliminate image and aliasing distortions and requires a larger silicon area. In this study, the authors propose a novel transmitter that eliminates both aliasing and image distortions while using a single SMPA. The transmitter can be implemented using all-digital techniques and achieves a higher efficiency as compared to both AF-PWM and AC-PWM based transmitters. Measurement results show an improvement of 11.3, 7.2, and 4.3 dBc in the ACLR as compared to the carrier-based PWM transmitter (C-PWMT), AF-PWMT, and AC-PWMT, respectively. The efficiency of the proposed transmitter is similar to that of C-PWMT, which is an improvement of 5% over AF-PWMT.