High-Throughput Signal Component Separator for Asymmetric Multi-Level Outphasing Power Ampli fiers Y an Li, Zhipeng Li, Oguzhan Uyar, Y ehuda Avniel , Alexandre Megretski, and Vladimir Stojanovi ć

Abstract

This paper presents an energy-ef ficient high - throughput and high-precision s ignal component separator (SCS) chip design for the asymmetric-m ultilevel-outphasing (AMO) power ampli fier. It uses a fixed-point piece-wis el i n e a rf u n c t i o n a l approximation developed to improve the hardware ef ficiency of the outphasing signal processing functions. The chip is fabricated in 45 nm SOI CMOS process and the SCS consumes an active area of 1.5 mm . The new algorithm enables the SCS to run at a throughput of 3.4 GSamples/s producing the phases with 12-bit accuracy. Compared to traditional lo w-throughput AMO SCS implementations, at 0.8 GSamples/s this design improves the area efficiency by 25 and the energy-ef ficiency by 2 .T h i sf a s t e s t high-precision SCS to date enables a new class of high-throughput mm-wave and base station transmitters that can operate at high area, energy and spectral ef ficiency.