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tutorial

Modeling RF IC transceivers
Designing next generation portable communications products is difficult without the
right tools. Modeling saves time, money and aggravation.
The RF receive path consists of a chip packages and substrates also have
David C. Lee low-noise amplifier (LNA), an image an impact on transceiver performance.
reject (IR) filter, and a low-noise mixer In the baseband chip, which is large

T he global market for portable com-


munication products such as
pagers, two-way radios, cordless
that translates RF signals to intermedi-
ate frequency (IF). This is followed by a
channel select filter (not shown), an IF
and complex, transmit and receive data
are processed in the digital domain.
The baseband transmitter performs
phones, cellular phones, personal global amplifier (not shown), and a demodula- channel encoding, pulse shaping and
positioning system (GPS) receivers, tor that down converts IF data to quad- D/A conversion. The baseband receiver
wireless internet browsers and portable rature baseband components (I/Q). The performs complex functions such as
video phones is growing at a rapid RF transmit path has a
pace. These small wireless handsets modulator that translates
carry voice, data, image and video, and baseband I/Q data to RF,
will revolutionize the way people com- followed by a bandpass IMAGE MIXER/
LNA REJECT I/Q
municate and access information. (BP) filter and a high-effi- FILTER
DEMODULATOR

Manufacturers of these high-perfor- ciency power amplifier


mance communication systems must (PA). The frequency syn- FREQUENCY
compete on the basis of power con- thesizer consists of one or SYNTHESIZER CHANNEL
sumption, cost, size, weight and fea- more phase locked loops
tures. The RF transceiver is the critical (PLLs) that generate sta-
BANDPASS
hardware that dictates the perfor- ble periodic signals for the PA FILTER
MODULATOR I/Q
mance, as well as the cost, the size and mixers, which must per- RF BASEBAND IC
the useful battery life in a portable form channel selection. It
handheld communication product. contains circuit blocks
However, design and verification of the such as voltage-controlled Figure 1. Typical transceiver architecture for a digital cellular phone
RF transceiver can be difficult or oscillators, crystal oscilla- chipset.
impossible without the right tools. tors, frequency dividers
and multipliers, phase detectors, etc. A/D conversion, multipath delay esti-
Architecture of an RF transceiver For optimal performance, the transceiv- mation, channel estimation, interfer-
Figure 1 is the RF transceiver archi- er may also have an automatic power ence cancellation and data decoding.
tecture in a digital cellular phone control (APC) loop for the RF transmit- Baseband processing can also compen-
chipset. Typical RF carrier frequency is ter, an automatic gain control (AGC) sate for small distortions in analog fil-
in the range of 1 GHz to 2 GHz with loop for the RF receiver, and an auto- ters and signal path nonlinearities.
the baseband modulation data rate in matic frequency control (AFC) loop for
the kb/s range in both current second- the frequency synthesizer. Accuracy and capacity
generation (2G) wireless systems and The RF chip can be implemented of RF simulators
future third-generation (3G) systems. using a number of advanced process Although the RF transceiver is a
technologies including sil- small part of a complete portable com-
icon bipolar, bipolar com- munication system, it is by far the most
plementary metal-oxide complex to design and verify. It takes
semiconductor (BiCMOS), twice as many design iterations as
INTERFERERS
gallium arsenide (GaAs), other mixed-signal chips when conven-
DESIRED
silicon germanium (SiGe) tional time-domain simulators are em-
CHANNEL and CMOS. It has several ployed. One complex reason that the
thousand transistors and verification of the RF transceiver has
RF RECEIVE FILTER,
BAND DUPLEXER LNA MIXER/ some on-chip spiral induc- been difficult is because the signal path
FILTER AMPLIFIER tors. The filters in the RF contains thousands of active devices,
transceiver are typically high-Q components such as crystal os-
implemented using off-chip cillators, and distributed elements such
surface acoustic wave as SAW filters, transmission lines, and
(SAW) filters and perhaps chip packaging. SPICE uses first- or
micromechanical (MEMS) second-order polynomials to represent
Figure 2. Diagram of nonlinear products created by interferers.
filters in the future. And, transient voltage and capacitor charge

78 www.rfdesign.com February 2000


waveforms locally in time, and approxi- when solving for the steady-state wave- tained only at a great computational
mates capacitor current waveforms by forms. Distributed elements are rou- expense.
polynomial differentiation. Long tran- tinely measured and characterized Frequency-domain solution methods
sient runs are required to simulate using tables of S-parameters. It is diffi- are better suited for simulating high-
high-Q circuits with widely separated cult to model frequency-dependent dis- frequency communication circuits con-
time constants. A time-domain RF sim- tributed elements in the time domain. taining high-Q components, distributed
ulator will accumulate numerical er- Even when this is possible, the simula- elements and sophisticated nonlinear
rors and exhibit false convergence tion results are inaccurate and are ob- transistor models with non-quasi-static
effects. Frequency-domain simulators
use Fourier series to capture steady-

INTERFERER
CONVERSION
GAIN SPURIOUS
RESPONSES
RF IF

IF AMP
LNA
RF IF MODU-
FILTER FILTER LATOR

ISOLATION LO FEED-THROUGH
LO2
LO

Figure 3. Complex design issues include port-to-


port isolation and spurious responses.

state voltage and capacitor charge


waveforms and obtain accurate steady-
state capacitor current waveforms by
exact time-differentiation of a Fourier
series.
The principle limitation of tradi-
tional harmonic balance algorithms is
capacity — run time grows as the cube
of the circuit size and the number of
Fourier components, making it imprac-
tical to simulate circuits containing
tens of transistors except on supercom-
puters. Recent advances in multitone
harmonic balance algorithms have
overcome this limitation.
Modern RF simulators that employ
Newton-Krylov solution methods ex-
hibit linear memory complexity and al-
most linear time complexity. Some of
these new methods are also perfectly
parallelizable, ideal for today’s mul-
tiple-processor computers. In a highly
optimized simulator, sparse, narrow-
band and multi-rate structures of the
signal frequency spectrum found in dif-
ferent parts of the RF transceiver and
the baseband interface are fully ex-
ploited, making it possible to simulate
RF integrated circuits containing thou-
sands of transistors in minutes.

Selectivity and dynamic range


The high selectivity and resistance to
interference required of modern wire-
less communication systems present
another challenge. GSM cellular
phones operate within a narrow band

80 February 2000
near 900 MHz and each channel uti- When two or more interferers are near of interferers. The GSM air interface
lizes 200 kHz of bandwidth. The LNA the desired channel, nonlinearity in the calls for phone operation in the pres-
in the RF receiver is designed to am- LNA creates intermodulation products ence of strong interferers (blockers)
plify weak, narrow-band signals within the channel that may block re- that are 56 dB to 99 dB above the de-
without adding excessive noise. ception (see Figure 2). Subsequent sired signal. A RF simulator must
Because the transmission medium is filter, mixer and amplifier stages must faithfully simulate these extreme oper-
shared by many users, there exists in- select the desired channel and process ating conditions. Dynamic range, the
terferers within the RF receive band. the weak signals despite the presence ability to accurately resolve weak sig-
nals in the presence of strong blockers,
and spectral resolution, the ability to
resolve signals that are closely spaced
in frequency, are key considerations.
The time-domain integration
methods used in SPICE are optimized
to compute large-signal waveforms.
SPICE gains speed by ignoring small
variations and adjusting the size of the
time-step accordingly. It has a numer-
ical noise floor of 60 dBc, and is not de-
signed with dynamic range in mind.
Accuracy can be improved by using a
tight simulation tolerance and very
small time-steps, but run times will
still be inversely proportional to spec-
tral resolution. For example, a stan-
dard two-tone intermodulation test of
the RF front-end requires pure sinu-
soidal tones applied at two closely
spaced frequencies—say 900 MHz and
900.2 MHz. Precise measurement will
be needed to determine the small third-
order intermodulation products at
899.8 MHz and 900.4 MHz, and fifth-
order intermodulation products at
899.6 MHz and 900.6 MHz. Transient
integration takes a minimum of Q =
fc/BW = 900 MHz/200 kHz = 4500 cy-
cles of the RF frequency. Millions of cy-
cles would be necessary if we were to
include the mixer in the simulation.
Each cycle requires many time points.
It is fair to conclude that SPICE
transient simulations will necessarily
be both slow and inaccurate. It should
be emphasized that any solution
method that uses the SPICE transient
algorithm (including shooting methods)
will have dynamic range limited by the
numerical noise floor of SPICE.
Frequency-domain methods are
much more appropriate for these cir-
cumstances. While a large number of
time-points are necessary to capture
the steady-state waveform accurately,
the frequency spectrum is sparse, so
frequency-domain simulations are in-
herently efficient for high-frequency
circuits where majority of the signals
are band-limited. Frequency-domain
solution methods solve the dynamic
range problem too—an accurate imple-
mentation of multi-tone harmonic bal-
ance has a numerical dynamic range

82 February 2000
that exceeds 200 dBc. performs the translation of RF signals quite complex. For example, both noise
to a lower IF band. Conversion gain, figure and conversion gain are degraded
RF receive path challenges image rejection, 1 dB compression point in the presence of blockers, which are
The RF receive path must be de- (P1 dB), 3rd order intercept point (IP3), strong interferers that can be 70 dB
signed to withstand interference and and noise figure (NF) are commonly bigger than the desired signals. Figure
amplify very weak signals without in- used metrics that can readily be ex- 4 shows the noise figure of a mixer as a
troducing excessive noise and distor- tracted from multi-tone harmonic bal- function of local oscillator (LO) power,
tion. The mixer in the RF receive path ance simulations. The design issues are with and without blocking interference.
It illustrates that noise performance
worsens when a blocker is present and
underlines the need to analyze noise in
RF integrated circuits under realistic
multi-tone, large-signal excitations.
In a homodyne (zero-IF) receiver,

MIXER NF vs LO POWER

Figure 3. Diagram of LO feedthrough


phenomenon.

poor port-to-port isolation due to cou-


pling through layout parasitic, sub-
strate and chip packaging can cause a
strong LO signal to find its way into
the receive chain, distorting the weak
RF signals and saturating the subse-
quent stages (see Figure 3). The LO
signal can also reach the antenna
causing in-band interference to nearby
receivers. A strong interferer can leak
to the LO port and mix with itself
causing a DC offset. In-band blockers
result in even-order intermodulation
products near DC, and can appear as
spurious responses due to a direct
feedthrough from the RF port to the IF
port. Another concern is system sta-
bility, because the total signal gain
from the antenna to the baseband
analog interface is more than 100 dB
and undesired oscillations can arise
due to parasitic feedback paths.
RF integrated circuits must function
over a wide range of frequency and
temperature, despite manufacturing
variations and power supply voltage
variations. So nominal simulations are
rarely sufficient. RF and analog simu-
lators must be designed to run long se-
quences of simulations under many op-
erating conditions. Parametric sweep of
input power to extract 1 dB compres-

84 February 2000
sion point, and frequency sweep to com- simulation is inherently slow because fast and reliable.
pute the large-signal conversion gain every point in a parametric sweep is an
and image rejection in an image-reject independent simulation run. In a fre- Conclusions
receiver are two basic examples. In a quency-domain simulator, the fre- Detailed multitone distortion, noise
time-domain simulator, the initial con- quency-domain solution at one point in and stability analysis of an RFIC chip
ditions used to start a transient a parametric sweep is often an excel- under extreme operating conditions are
analysis must satisfy the circuit differ- lent initial guess for the next point, so essential for detecting unforeseen prob-
ential equations. Hence time-domain harmonic balance simulation is both lems before a design is committed to
silicon. Time-domain simulation ap-
proaches cannot handle distributed ele-
ments and high-Q components accu-
rately and efficiently. Only frequency
domain methods can take advantage of
the sparse, narrowband and multi-rate
structures inherent in the signal fre-
quency spectrum encountered in RF
transceivers. Recent algorithmic ad-
vances in multitone harmonic balance
simulation offer the speed, the capacity,
the spectral resolution and the dynamic
range required to verify today’s high
performance radio frequency trans-
ceivers.

About the author


As an RFIC Scientist at Mentor
Graphics, David C. Lee is responsi-
ble for defining and developing
future-generations of CAD methods
for verifying extremely large and
complex mixed-signal and RF chips.
Previously, Lee has worked in the
area of circuit simulation and model-
ing for 10 years at Bell Laboratories
of Lucent Technologies (1992-98)
and Bell Northern Research of
Nortel (1988-92). Lee is also the
founder of the Atlantic Research and
Development Center in Allentown,
Pennsylvania. Lee earned bachelor’s
of science and master’s of science
degrees in Systems Design
Engineering from the University of
Waterloo in Waterloo, Canada. He
can be contacted at 610.770.6210 or
e-mail: david_lee@mentor.com

86 February 2000

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