TaNS-DDRF: A 160-MHz Bandwidth 6-GHz Carrier Frequency Digital-Direct RF Transmitter for Wi-Fi 6E with Targeted Noise-Shaping

Noise-shaping is essential for Direct Digital to RF (DDRF) transmission but filtering of Out of Band (OOB) quantization noise is difficult at 6 GHz for Wi-Fi 6E. We present a filter-free DDRF architecture that introduces targeted noise-shaping (TaNS) to meet the spectral mask. TaNS attenuates quantization noise at offsets between one and ten times the bandwidth by moving it far out-of-band. The prototype is fabricated in 28nm CMOS with an active area of 0.022 mm
²
and shows the feasibility of 64-QAM modulation up to 281 Mbps.