ABSTRACT
The market demand for ultralow-cost cell phones by billions of first-time users in the developing countries has spurred development of single-chip second generation (2G) radios. Modern 2G radios integrate a radiofrequency (RF) transceiver with a digital baseband (DBB) processor in scaled complementary metal oxide semiconductors (CMOS). The authors present a characterization technique to estimate the mismatches in transistor switches of an RF digitally controlled pre-power amplifier (DPA) and tuning varactors of the RF digitally-controlled oscillator (DCO). DPA and DCO are vital components of the Digital RF processor (DRP) technology at the heart of the modern global system for mobile communication (GSM)/ Enhanced data rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE) RF transceiver designs at Texas Instruments. The authors describe novel techniques used to estimate and arbitrate the device variability in the physical DPA and DCO designs. The DCO performs conversion from digital code to carrier frequency deviation, whereas DPA performs conversion from digital code to RF amplitude of the carrier.
