A Digital Polar Amplifier for Ultra-Wideband with dynamic element matching

Digital polar architectures have been employed on wireless standards with low fractional bandwidths (FB) and high power requirements. To study if they can be adopted for low-power and high FB requirements, we propose a low-voltage 3-bit Digital Polar Amplifier (DPA) for Ultra-Wideband (FB of 15.4%). The DPA comprises 7 parallel RF amplifiers driven by the RF phase-modulated component and 7 cascode transistors (connected in series) controlled by the digitized envelope component. Using NFET models from the 130-nm CMOS technology, simulations reveal that our DPA achieves an EVM of -21.33 dB. To test its robustness, Monte Carlo simulations (on ideal models) reveal a yield of 95% in the presence of gain variations. In addition, we have shown that when we introduced dynamic element matching to the architecture, the yield increased by 3%.