Sigma-delta based techniques for future multi-standard wireless radios

Abstract: Improvements in process technology and design innovations have resulted in compact and cost effective digital baseband solutions. The radio part, however, has remained a bottleneck in terms of chip area and power consumption as the feature size of analog devices does not directly benefit from scaling. With the addition of yet more standards into emerging products, the requirements of future radios will extend over characteristic performance features into demands of programmable and reconfigurable hardware for radios covering multiple frequency bands. Hence, a guideline in the design of such radios is a large degree of hardware sharing.The thesis investigates the application of sigma-delta modulation to arising multistandard wireless radios. First, it reviews principles in wireless radios, such as selected modulation and access techniques. It also examines several communication standards of personal wireless radios as well as common receiver architectures for their implementation. This is followed by general considerations and background information about sigma-delta modulators. In the third and fourth chapter, implementations to two blocks of a wireless radio receiver system are suggested: An architecture for a frequency synthesizer and an implementation of an analog-to-digital converter.In the first contribution, the thesis develops a novel concept for frequency synthesis that is more suitable for multi-band, multi-standard radio architectures, achieving a large amount of hardware sharing among different wireless standards. As a second pillar, the thesis contributes with the design of a dual-standard sigma-delta modulator for data conversion within a radio receiver. Parts of the work concerning the dual-standard modulator are embodied in a granted swedish patent.