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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
INTERFERER
CONVERSION
GAIN SPURIOUS
RESPONSES
RF IF
IF AMP
LNA
RF IF MODU-
FILTER FILTER LATOR
ISOLATION LO FEED-THROUGH
LO2
LO
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
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.
86 February 2000