PAPER-PRESENTATION

A fully integrated 2X1 Dual Band Direct Conversion Mobile WiMAX tranceiver. Features :
Dual Mode Fractional Divider Noise Shaping Transimpedance Amplifier 65nm CMOS technology Presented by Akshay Bhardwaj EE08B097
Introduction

Outline Introduction Transceiver Architecture Frequency Planning Circuit Design Measurement results Conclusions

Introduction
WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for MicroWave Access) provides wireless HIGH speed INTERNET service globally.

Mobile WiMAX uses: MIMO technique. OFDMA modulation scheme. High Data rates.
Challenges : Single chip implementation. Low power Consumption Floor Planning.

Tranceiver Architecture
The transceiver is composed of a PLL, LO distribution block, two receivers and a transmitter. Covers frequency ranges of dual band Mobile WiMAX Low-Band (2.3-2.7GHz) High-Band(3.3-3.8GHz) Adopts Direct Conversion Architecture Minimise circuit Components Minimise power consumption

Direct Conversion Receiver

Receiver has two RF paths for LOW and HIGH band respectively RF input first amplified by cascoded common source LNA with LC tank and down-converted to baseband I/Q signals by I/Q mixers. The receiver adopts passive mixers to reduce the flicker noise from switching transistors. Then, flicker noise from the following TIA op-amp becomes dominant , hence a noise shaping TIA is proposed to improve the noise figure(NF) of receiver. In each I/Q path , the down-converted signals are filtered and amplified by noise shaping TIA, an LPF andd two variable gain amplifiers. Finally, signals converted to digital signals by ADCs.

Receiver Block Diagram

Direct Conversion Transmitter

The transmitter has two output paths for dual band operations. Digital I/Q signals are converted to analog baseband I/Q signals by current steering DACs in I/Q paths. Next, baseband signals are filtered by reconstruction LPFs and up-converted to RF signal by I/Q mixers. To reduce circuit components , I/Q mixers are shared in the LB and HB paths by employing wide-band passive mixers. The output power of the up-converted RF signal is controlled by programmable gain stages.

Transmitter Block Diagram

Frequency Planning
The single VCO in the PLL is covers frequency tuning range of 8.8-10.8 GHz. The operating frequency of the VCO is divided by 2 and LO signal of 4.45.4Ghz is globally distributed. LB operation: For LB ,global LO signal is divided by 2 just before passive mixers in the receiver and the transmitter. HB operation: For HB, global LO signal is divided by 4/3 and then the HB LO signal of 3.3-4.05 G Hz is obtained. Process : Global LO signal of 4.4-5.4GHz is divided by 2 locally and mixed with global LO signal to generate LO signal of 6.6-8.1GHz and finally divided by 2 to generate 3.3-4.05GHz.

Frequency Plan

Circuit Design
Totally three key circuits. Noise shaping TIA for mitigating flicker noise of scaled CCMOS devices Dual Mode fractional divider employed in the inductor less LO distribution path. Wide-band passive mixer employed in the transmitter

A. Noise shaping transimpedance amplifier

In the receiver design , passive mixer topology is adopted to reduce flicker noise , thus reducing the flicker noise from the TIA becomes very important.

Large Input transistor size of Op-amp can be straightaway used but it may make Op-amp design much more complex due to other constraints - gain, bandwidth, linearity and stability issues.

Basic TIA
Block Diagram :

Noise Shaping TIA

2.

NS-TIA with feedback cap 2.

NS-TIA
I.

contd.

For basic TIA , Signal transfer function(STF) and Noise Transfer Function(NTF) are derived. GI =conductance seen from mixer output GF = feedback conductance of TIA AV = Voltage gain of op-amp Vn2 = input referred noise of op-amp

NS-TIA

contd.

II ) To suppress flicker noise , we place an additional gain component before the op-amp and as input referred noise is suppressed by that gain.

Ya in the first block is replaced by Yb which is subdivided into Ya and which is additional gain component.

III ). Since the actual implementation of TIA has 1st order LPF characteristics ,we consider influence of feedback capacitance. Cf reduces impedance at node X and noise is selectively suppressed only at low frequencies and NTF is shape into a high pass characteristic.

NS-TIA
STF and NTF :

contd.

NS-TIA

contd.

With the aid of the additional gain boost by , the STF of the noise-shaping TIA becomes closer to the ideal low-pass characteristics than the one without the gain boost. Since the negative conductance cell is placed between the virtual ground nodes of the TIA, linearity of the negative conductance cell itself is not critical. Linearity of the proposed TIA is better than a conventional one without the negative conductance cell because the open loop gain of the TIA is larger

B. Dual-Mode Fractional Divider

It is composed of the divide-by-2 circuit, the gm-cell and the mixer. For suppressing the lower side-band spur generated by the mixer in the high-band operation, we have adopted single side-band (SSB) mixer architecture.

C. Wide-Band Passive Mixer in Transmitter

Actual implementation is the double-balanced topology for both I/Q paths. The mixer is composed of resistors R1 , a capacitor C1 for AC coupling and a switching transistor M1 . The resistor R1 is the termination resistor as a load of the mixer, which is also used for biasing the following programmable gain stage. Wideband characteristics are achieved by making small enough to exclude the effect of parasitic capacitance on impedance at the node X.

Measurement results
By enabling the noise-shaping function, 4 dB improvement of the receiver output noise at 7 kHz is achieved Difference of STF is negligibly small with or without the noise-shaping function

contd.
In TIA , by making delta small, we can improve the noise suppression ratio but we cannot make it too small as when GN becomes larger than GI + GF , polarity of delta becomes negative nad the feedback loop becomes unstable.

Layout of the compact dual-mode fractional divider The size is 56 um by 118 um It is laid out to minimize the lower side-band spur of 1/3*fc caused by the device mismatches and layout asymmetry of the single-gate mixers employed in the dual-mode fractional divider. As a result of fractional-then-distribute plan all the spurs become very small. All the spur levels are below 60 dBc.

Wide-band spectrum measured at transmitter output.

 Error Vector Magnitudes: The constellation plots measured at +1 dBm transmitter output are shown in Figure. The error vector magnitudes (EVM) in 2.5 GHz and 3.5 GHz bands are 34.0 dB and 31.0 dB, respectively

TX constellation plots measured at +1 dBm output.

Summary of Transceiver Performance

.

Die micrograph of test chip

Conclusions
A fully integrated 2 RX X 1 TX dual-band direct-conversion mobile WiMAX transceiver in 65 nm CMOS technology was presented. The distribute-then-fractional frequency plan is proposed, which employs the inductor-less LO distribution with the compact dual-mode fractional dividers. The frequency plan provides higher flexibility for the floor planning of the long LO distribution path. To mitigate the flicker noise of scaled CMOS devices, the noise-shaping TIA with the negative conductance cell is proposed which keeps signal transfer function the same and suppresses flicker noise. the power consumption of the receiver employing the noise-shaping TIA is lower than that of the mobile WiMAX transceivers reported previously, total NF of 3.8 dB and 4.5 dB is achieved in the low-band and the highband operations , respectively.

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