Analysis of RF impairments on EVM performance of the OFDM PHY of IEEE 802.11ad standard

The paper presents a system-level simulation platform supporting both top-down and bottom-up design and verifications based on 802.11ad standard, and EVM degradation on the OFDM PHY due to various RF impairments, such as LO phase noise, PA nonlinearity, I/Q mismatch, and ADC/DAC resolution are simulated and elaborated. The platform has been verified based on the EVM comparison between simulation and measured results. This work provides RF designers with comprehensive system-level and circuit-level overviews of 802.11ad RF transceivers for Gbps wireless communications on a pre-silicon base.