Design of carrier-aggregated modulator for LTE-advanced

LTE-Advanced uses carrier aggregation (CA) of multiple component carriers (CCs) to achieve high-bandwidth transmission. To fulfill such technology, the novel carrier-aggregated modulator structure is proposed. In this work, the carrier-aggregated modulator is implemented in 0.18 µm CMOS technology and tested with two 10 MHz LTE-Advanced Release 10 signals to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture in both the intra-band and inter-band CA. The measured output spectrum and EVM meet the LTE-Advanced requirements.