Digital RF Processor (DRP™) for wireless transmitters

RF transceivers have recently migrated to low-cost digital deep-submicron CMOS processes, where their integration with baseband processors and memory serve to form low cost SoC solutions for various radio standards. Such process environment, optimized for digital logic and SRAM memory, is extremely restrictive for conventional analog and RF designs. This tutorial presents recently developed techniques that transform the RF transceiver circuit design complexities into digital domain, where the strengths of the digital processes are leveraged, allowing the SoC to benefit from simple migration with process node scaling, advanced design automation, re-configurability and testability. Digital signal processing, both hardware and software based, is used extensively to alleviate analog design complexity, allowing the reduction in cost and power consumption in a reconfigurable design environment. This DRPtrade transmitter tutorial focuses on the fundamentals of the digital polar transmitter of the Bluetooth single-chip solution offered by Texas Instruments.