Behavioral analysis and dimensioning of UMTS transmitters baseband blocks

We present the design trade-offs for dimensioning the baseband blocks (DAC and reconstruction filter) of a direct conversion transmitter for the UMTS standard. A Matlab model performs a time domain analysis to evaluate the impact of each baseband block non-ideality on the overall transmitter performance. The proposed approach has been used to design a 0.13 /spl mu/m CMOS test-chip implementing the DAC and filter blocks.