A CMOS Direct-Digital BPSK Modulator Using an Active Balun and Common-Gate Switches

A 0.18 mum CMOS binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulator circuit is proposed and demonstrated that can achieve high data rates and strong carrier suppression while having low DC power consumption and a very compact layout. The modulator accepts a single-ended microwave signal (2.4 GHz) and converts it to a balanced signal using an active balun. Complementary common-gate switches are then used to select one of the two balun outputs in correspondence with the digital data to produce BPSK modulation. Excellent performance is obtained with measured phase and amplitude errors of less than 1deg and 0.1 dB, respectively, and data rates up to 200 Mbps with a carrier frequency of 2.4 GHz. The insertion loss for the modulator is approximately 3 dB. Additionally, the active balun provides input matching and obtains an input reflection coefficient of -13 dB. The circuit layout area is 310 mumtimes260 mum and the power consumption is 7.2 mW.