A 3.1–4.8 GHz transmitter with a high frequency divider in 0.18 μm CMOS for OFDM-UWB

Abstract

A fully integrated low power RF transmitter for a WiMedia 3.1–4.8 GHz multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing ultra-wideband system is presented. With a separate transconductance stage, the quadrature up-conversion modulator achieves high linearity with low supply voltage. The co-design of different resonant frequencies of the modulator and the differential to single (D2S) converter ensures in-band gain flatness. By means of a series inductor peaking technique, the D2S converter obtains 9 dB more gain without extra power consumption. A divided-by-2 divider is used for carrier signal generation. The measurement results show an output power between −10.7 and −3.1 dBm with 7.6 dB control range, an OIP3 up to 12 dBm, a sideband rejection of 35 dBc and a carrier rejection of 30 dBc. The ESD protected chip is fabricated in the Jazz 0.18 μm RF CMOS process with an area of 1.74 mm2 and only consumes 32 mA current (at 1.8 V) including the test associated parts.