DSP engine design for LINC wireless transmitter systems

Linear amplification with nonlinear components (LINC) technique is a linearization technique for power amplifier designs. By using LINC, the nonlinear power amplifier with high power efficiency can be used to amplify the input signal in a transmitter system with high linearity performance. In this paper, we propose a DSP engine design for LINC wireless transmitter under the WCDMA specification. New algorithms and architectures are proposed, and they can reduce the hardware cost efficiently. We also utilize Agilent ADS to perform mixed-mode system simulation to verify our design. The DSP engine is implemented by Verilog and synthesized with UMC 0.18 mum process. The DSP engine area is 0.155 mm² and the maximum clock frequency is 117 MHz. Finally, we use a FPGA to verify our design