A Low-Cost All-Digital Transmitter Using Multigigabit Transceivers

This letter presents an all-digital transmitter architecture that features a pair of low-cost multigigabit transceivers (MGTs) operating at 16 GS/s. Unlike conventional systems that require high-resolution or high-speed digital to analog converters (DACs), which impose heavy resource demands, this work leverages pulse modulation combined with dithering and quantization process to generate RF signals using single-bit data streams. This enables low-cost RF transmission without compromising linearity performance. By driving the power amplifiers (PAs) entirely with two-level digital signals, the PAs can be biased lower and operate more efficiently. The proposed system was validated with a 20-MHz 64-quadratic-amplitude modulation (QAM) 5G new radio (NR) uplink (UL) signal. The transmitter achieved −31.2 dBc adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR), 4.2% error vector magnitude (EVM), and 36.9% efficiency. The proposed transmitters meet the 5G NR requirements without any additional linearization.