Compact router transceiver architecture for carrier aggregation systems

To meet the IMT-Advance technical requirement, both 3GPP LTE-Advanced and IEEE 802.16m include carrier aggregation as one of the key RF technologies. Carrier aggregation uses several carriers with narrow bandwidth which will be combined in the upper layer for high data rate transmission. These carriers can be either adjacent to each other or in different bands. This work describes a transceiver architecture which adopts router structure in the RF path. In the proposed architecture, each RF path can be assigned with different number of carriers according to the corresponding requirements for each band to reduce hardware overhead. The proposed architecture is simulated with Agilent ADS and emulated with hardware for further validation.