EEEN40610 Digital RF

Academic Year 2017/2018

The past decade has successfully brought all-digital techniques to radio frequency (RF) synthesizers and transmitters, as well as digitally intensive techniques to receivers. In addition, digital assistance is applied to RF circuits to improve performance and power consumption. This module will introduce basic concepts of the digital RF approach and walk through the major building blocks that comprise the new RF transceiver architecture:
1. All-digital phase-locked loop (ADPLL) comprising: digitally-controlled oscillator (DCO), time-to-digital converter (TDC), and digital loop filter.
2. All-digital transmitter featuring ADPLL with wideband modulation capability, and comprising digitally-controlled power amplifier (DPA)
3. Direct-sampling discrete-time receiver comprising switched-cap circuits that perform various FIR and IIR filter operations.
Homework exercises use Matlab to model and simulate the above three subsystems.

Outline:
1. Introduction to the topics of digital RF and digitally-assisted RF
2. Digitally-controlled oscillator (DCO), its phase noise modeling and simulation
3. DCO interface: sigma-delta modulation, dynamic element matching, DCO gain normalization
4. Principles of phase-domain frequency synthesis: all-digital PLL (ADPLL)
5. Time-to-digital converter (TDC) and metastability
6. ADPLL closed-loop behavior
7. Direct frequency modulation of ADPLL
8. Principles of switched-mode and digital power amplifier (DPA)
9. DPA modeling and non-linearities; predistortion
10. Principles of a discrete-time (DT) receiver
11. Signal processing of a DT mixer: IIR, FIR and decimation
12. DT receiver modeling and simulation
13. Special topics, project presentations, etc.