Design of the High-performance RF

Transmitter for IEEE 802.11ac System

Laituan Zhang, Jianyi Zhou, Zhiqiang Yu, Xiaohui Zhou, Ruoqiao Zhang
State Key Lab. of Millimeter Waves, Southeast University, Nanjing, 211189, P.R. China

Abstract-In the field of high-speed wireless LAN, IEEE
802.11ac is gradually becoming the mainstream standard. Based
on the main requirements of IEEE 802.11ac standard, this paper
provides details on how to implement the high performance RF
transmitter working in 5GHz to 6GHz band, which can support
the very high throughput (VHT) mode of the standard. The max-
im bandwidth of the transmitter is 80MHz and 256-QAM modu-
lation is supported. The transmitter uses double-conversion su-
per-heterodyne structure, in which the intermediate frequency (IF)
is selected at 1.05GHz, with an 80MHz bandwidth. The test re-
sults show that the maximum output power is up to 18dBm and
for every working frequency, the gain flatness is less than 0.5dB.
The modulation accuracies evaluated by error vector magnitude
(EVM) of the 10MHz and 80MHz bandwidth signals with 256-
QAM modulation are better than 0.6% and 0.9%. When 80MHz
bandwidth IEEE 801.11ac signal with 256-QAM modulation is
applied to the transmitter system, the EVM is below -40dB when
the output power is lower than 10dBm.
Index Terms-Super-heterodyne transmitter, IEEE 802.11ac, er-
ror vector magnitude (EVM), high-speed wireless LAN
every work frequency becomes a challenging problem [3]. Al-
so, for the modulator chips on the market, their orthogonality
of the lower frequency is better than higher frequency. There-
fore, we select the super-heterodyne transmitter. By observing
the output spurs of ADS harmonic balance simulation [4], we
find that 1.05GHz intermediate frequency has a relatively more
attractive performance.
The overall structure of super-heterodyne transmitter is pre-
sented in Fig. 1. To obtain a good image rejection, a quadrature
up-conversion scheme is adopted in the second conversion.
And a bandpass filter is placed before the power amplifier to
suppress the leakage of second carrier and other spurs.

I. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, with the increase of the high-speed wireless data
transmission applications, wireless LAN technology experi-
ences a rapid development. IEEE 802.11ac standard has be-
come the mainstream standard of next generation wireless
LAN technology for its characteristic of supporting extremely
high throughput [1]. Compared with IEEE 802.11n, IEEE
802.11ac standard puts forward higher requirements on the
wireless transceiver performance, for its air interface adopting
a wider frequency bandwidth (increasing to 80MHz, even
160MHz with carrier aggregation). In order to support such
wide bandwidth, the standard focuses on the 5GHz-6GHz fre-
quency band. Also, many other advanced technologies such as
multi-user MIMO technology and higher-order modulation
technology (up to 256-QAM) are adopted in the standard.
There are still a lot of challenges on how to design and im-
plement a radio frequency hardware circuit, which can perfect-
ly support 80MHz 256-QAM modulated signals on 5GHz-
6GHz bands. And it has become a research area of great inter-
est in the field of wireless communications.
II. DESIGN OF THE SYSTEM
Considering the complexity and size of the system, the di-
rect-conversion transmitter is a good choice [2]. However, the
adjustable work frequency is required as well. For the direct-
conversion transmitter, how to reduce its carrier leakage at
Figure 1. Structure diagram
The whole transmitter system will be constructed on a PCB
board, the main body part of the circuit is realized by using 4
layer structure FR4 board. And the entire RF transmitter uses a
6V DC power supply. The system control interface includes a
switching signal of transmitter TX_ON, a power control signal
APC and a PLL frequency control signal. The control part is
realized by CPLD and FPGA circuits.
The photograph of the single-channel super-heterodyne RF
transmitter is shown in Fig. 2, and the detailed structure of the
PCB layout is marked in the figure. The overall dimension of
the circuit is approximately 24cm×8cm.
Figure 2. Photograph of the transmitter link
III. THE LINK TESTS
A. Test environment
The detailed test instruments are listed in Table I, shown in
Fig. 3.

978-1-5090-1317-3/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE

B. The transmitter system test
Fig. 4 gives the test results in the 80MHz bandwidth of
transmitting chain, showing that the gain flatness is less than
0.4dB. And the fluctuation of the system gain can meet the
requirements very well.
Fig. 5 shows the I/Q imbalance characteristic of the transmit-
ter. It can be seen that the sideband suppression reaches up to
45dB. This value indicates that the imperfections in I/Q modu-
lator due to quadrature and I/Q gain mismatch have been cor-
rected to a normal level.

Figure 5. Sideband suppression test

Figure 3. Test environment
TABLE I
INSTRUMENT LIST OF TEST ENVIRONMENT
Item
PXA Signal Analyzer N9030A
MXG Vector Signal Generator N5282B
ESG-AP Series Signal Generator E4426B
PSG-A Series Signal Generator E8251A
In the first method, the EVM test result of the 256-QAM
digital modulation signal with 80MHz bandwidth is presented
in Fig. 6 (including a 15dB attenuator at the output of transmit-
ter). 10 work frequency points are chosen to conduct the EVM
test, and the results are given in Table II and Table III. For the
IEEE 802.11ac signal, the EVM tests are carried out at
5.15GHz/5.45GHz/5.85GHz. And the results are demonstrated
in Fig. 7 and Table IV (including a 20dB attenuator at the out-
put of transmitter).
It is clearly revealed that the EVM value is very small and
Frequency the signal to noise ratio (SNR) is extremely high. But with the
3Hz-50GHz
increase of the bandwidth, the EVM value will deteriorate and
9kHz-6GHz
250kHz-4GHz the SNR will reduce. The relationship between EVM and SNR
250kHz-20GHz is as follows [5]:

SNR = − ª¬ 4.2276 + 20*log10 ( EVM /100% ) º¼ (1)

This equation is for 256-QAM only, and the 4.2276 repre-

sents the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR in dB) of the
256-QAM signal. EVM is a comprehensive indicator when
referring to evaluating a system performance. From EVM, a
system performance on noise, inter-symbol interference (ISI),
non-linearity, flatness, sideband suppression and other aspects
can be basically observed [6]. So it can be concluded that the
overall performance of the transmitter is excellent.

Figure 4. Transmitter gain flatness

To conduct the transmitting link modulation signal accuracy
test, there are two methods. For the first method, the baseband
signal generated from the instrument N5182B is sent into the
radio frequency link, and then the output is sent into the
N9030A for digital demodulation. The signal generated in this
method is a single-carrier-modulated signal. For the second
method, the IEEE 802.11ac signal with 256-QAM modulation
and 80MHz bandwidth is downloaded from a computer to the
N5182B, and the output of the signal source is taken as the Figure 6. EVM test for 80MHz/256-QAM
baseband signal and sent into the transmitter.
 TABLE II. TABLE IV.
EVM TEST RESULTS FOR 10MHZ/256QAM EVM TEST RESULTS FOR IEEE 802.11AC SIGNAL
Center Center Frequency
5.15 5.45 5.85
Frequency 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 (GHz)
(GHz) EVM (dB) -41.655 -40.853 -39.501
EVM (%) 0.476 0.490 0.483 0.506 0.544
Center
Frequency 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 6.0
(GHz)
EVM (%) 0.600 0.630 0.690 0.588 0.683
TABLE III.
EVM TEST RESULTS FOR 80MHZ/256QAM
Center
Frequency 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5
(GHz)
EVM (%) 0.669 0.681 0.689 0.768 0.890
Center
Frequency 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 6.0
(GHz)
EVM (%) 0.685 0.891 0.783 0.947 1.06
Figure 8. ACPR with 40MHz bandwidth

IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper, several important indicators used to evaluate
transmitter system performances are tested respectively, in-
cluding the gain flatness, EVM, and ACPR. The test results
show that the overall system performance is excellent, and can
meet the requirements of IEEE 802.11ac standard for RF cir-
cuits. The transmitter system supports the 256-QAM digital
(a) Constellation modulation signals with 10MHz, 20MHz, 40MHz and even
80MHz bandwidth very well. Also, the IEEE 802.11ac OFDM
modulated signal can achieve a significant performance. The
system performs very well at every work frequency in 5GHz-
6GHz band, and builds an ideal experiment platform for IEEE
802.11ac.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by the NSFC under
Grant 61401093 and 61401088.

(b) Spectrum REFERENCES

(c) OFDM Error Summary
Figure 7. Result of EVM test for IEEE 802.11ac signal with 256-QAM modu-
lation and 80MHz bandwidth @5.45GHz
Fig. 8 shows the adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) test
results of the transmitter system. For the signal with 256-QAM
modulation and 40MHz bandwidth, the ACPR can be up to
48dB, indicating that the nonlinearity of the RF circuit is not
obvious [7], and the overall performance of the transmitter can
satisfy the requirements.
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