Digital IF up conversion for economical wireless implementations

While most of the attention in the open literature paid to digital intermediate frequency (IF) technology has addressed digital down conversion architectures, digital up conversion architectures are just as important and can be equally beneficial. For the past few years Harris Semiconductor has been experimenting with various single and multiple channel digital up converter architectures for economical implementations of wireless transmitters. This paper gives a top level overview of the fundamentals of digital up conversion and various architectures which have the potential for widespread use in wireless systems