Continuous-Time Digital Front-Ends for Multistandard Wireless Transmission

The book "Continuous-Time Digital Front-Ends for Multistandard Wireless Transmission" offers a comprehensive analysis and design approaches for fully digital multistandard transmitter front-ends. These innovative systems are capable of directly driving multiple switching power amplifiers, eliminating the need for analog components. The authors examine various architectures, focusing on polar architecture with pulse width modulation (PWM), which is based on untimed delay lines and continuous digital hardware elements. This allows readers to shift accuracy issues from the voltage domain to the time domain, which is particularly relevant for scaling submicron CMOS technology. The book provides a theoretical analysis of PWM-based architectures and highlights their impact on signal and spectral quality. Additionally, key design criteria are identified, and various solutions with their advantages and disadvantages are presented. Finally, two chips designed in nanometer CMOS technologies are showcased along with their measurement results for validation.