FDDAC-based Transmitter with 2 GHz Modulation Bandwidth and 8 Gbit/s Data Rate

This paper presents a transmitter (Tx) concept which generates a wide coherent modulation bandwidth (BW) while attenuating the out-of-band emissions without oversampling and digital filtering. The proposed Fourier-Domain digital-to-analogue converter (FDDAC) based Tx concept exploits the relation between the discrete- and continuous-time Fourier Transform leading to intrinsic Nyquist filtering. Thus, the sample rates in the analogue-mixed-signal and the entire digital signal processor (DSP) blocks are reduced by up to two orders of magnitude compared to conventional Txs. The experimentally verified Tx-IC for 802.11ad/y applications generates a single-carrier signal with a modulation BW of up to 2 GHz and 16QAM. The occupied chip area is 3.6 mm
²
including the DSP. The measured EVM values are 7.2% and 11.8% for a 1 and 2 GHz QPSK signal, whereas they are 9.6% and 13.9% for a 1 and 2 GHz-wide 16QAM signal, respectively. Thus, the maximum demonstrated data rate is 8 Gbit/s.