A Low-Power NB-IoT Transceiver With Digital-Polar Transmitter in 180-nm CMOS

A fully integrated 750~960 MHz wireless transceiver (TRX) is presented for single-tone NB-IoT applications. Effective design methodologies and techniques, from the system level to circuit level, are proposed to address various design challenges while achieving low-power consumption. The TRX consists of a low-IF receiver with 180-kHz signal bandwidth, a digital polar transmitter with 3.75-kHz signal bandwidth, and a fractional-N frequency synthesizer. Passive current mixer is employed in the receiver to improve the linearity and avoid the sensitivity degradation due to 1/f noise. Automatic I/Q imbalance calibration is integrated to improve image rejection ratio (IRR) with the aid of external FPGA. The transmitter is implemented in the digital polar architecture to improve the narrow-band spectrum purity, integrated with an inverse Class-D digital power amplifier (DPA) to achieve high output power and efficiency. A Class-C voltage-controlled oscillator with automatic frequency control assisted the dynamic gate biasing technique is used in the fractional-N PLL frequency synthesizer. Two prototypes are implemented in 180-nm CMOS. By optimizing analog baseband configuration in the receiver and utilizing the revised thermometer-coding and binary-coding-based array placement in the DPA, the receiver achieves 4.0-dB noise figure, 48-dB IRR, and 60-dB PGA dynamic range, and the DPA outputs 23.2dBm maximum saturation power with 44.5% PAE. Furthermore, the transmitter system verifications demonstrate 3.87% error-vector magnitude (EVM) for 891 MHz π/4-DQPSK signals at 18.87-dBm output power with -40-dBc out-of-band rejection. The transmitter achieves a dynamic range from -35 to 20 dBm when the demodulation EVM threshold of the system is set to 10%.