Digitally Assisted, Fully Integrated, Wideband Transmitters for High-Speed Millimeter-Wave Wireless Communication Links

This book presents design methods and considerations for digitally-assisted wideband millimeter-wave transmitters. It addresses comprehensively both RF design and digital implementation simultaneously, in order to design energy- and cost-efficient high-performance transmitters for mm-wave high-speed communications. It covers the complete design flow, from link budget assessment to the transistor-level design of different RF front-end blocks, such as mixers and power amplifiers, presenting different alternatives and discussing the existing trade-offs. The authors also analyze the effect of the imperfections of these blocks in the overall performance, while describing techniques to correct and compensate for them digitally. Well-known techniques are revisited, and some new ones are described, giving examples of their applications and proving them in real integrated circuits. 

• Discusses the design of mm-wave transceivers from both the analog and digital design perspectives;
  
• Analyzes different well-known architectures and revisits some key aspects in order to make them suitable for mmW circuits;
  
• Covers design considerations at the system, block/circuit and transistor levels of abstraction;
  
• Enables readers to build high-performance, energy and cost-efficient mm-wave radios;
  
• Addresses circuit reliability and sensibility to environmental variations, in order to implement robust and auto-adjustable systems;
  
• Analyzes quantitatively the effect of different imperfections on the performance of the whole system, and proposes different methods to compensate for them and mitigate their effects;
  
• Applies design techniques described in real examples, demonstrating the transmission of multi-Gbps signals.