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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS–I: REGULAR PAPERS
Reconfigurable Digital Delta-Sigma Modulation
Transmitter Architecture for Concurrent
Multi-Band Transmission
Nishant Kumar , Student Member, IEEE, Karun Rawat , Senior Member, IEEE,
and Fadhel M. Ghannouchi, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract— This paper presents a reconfigurable delta-sigma
modulation (DSM) architecture for concurrent multi-band trans-
mission. The reconfigurability in terms of carrier spacing and
the number of simultaneous carrier transmission is useful for
applications such as carrier aggregation in 5G. This paper uses
4 t h order reconfigurable multi-band DSM (RMB-DSM) such that
the zeros of the noise transfer function can be reconfigured to fall
at multiple frequencies, where the carriers are being aggregated.
The quantization noise between the transmission bands is a
critical issue in the case of multi-band transmission. Therefore,
a multi-band additional noise shaping (ANS) function is also
introduced, which generates notches around each carrier and
reduces the noise level between the multiple pass-bands. The
proposed scheme has been validated in simulation, as well as
in experiment for aggregating up to four 15 MHz long term
evolution (LTE) signals with an overall aggregated bandwidth
of 60 MHz. Measurement results show a 10-25% improvement
in coding efficiency and 15-35 dB improvement in noise level
near the operating frequency band using the proposed multi-
band augmented noise shaping technique, as compared to the
standard DSM. The corresponding improvement of 8% in the
overall efficiency is observed by using the proposed multi-band
augmented noise shaping technique.
Index Terms— Band pass DSM (BP-DSM), carrier aggregation,
5G, delta-sigma modulation (DSM), multi-band transmission,
noise shaping, power amplifier (PA).
I. I NTRODUCTION
W ITH the recent advancement in wireless communi-
cation, the demand for energy and spectral efficient
reconfigurable transmitter architecture with a high data rate
has increased significantly [1], [2]. For such a high data
rate transmission, a carrier aggregation scheme is proposed
in a long-term evolution advanced (LTE-A) standard, where a
carrier with large bandwidth is divided into several sub-carriers
Manuscript received November 14, 2019; revised January 24, 2020;
accepted February 9, 2020. This work was mainly supported by SERB Grant
CRG/2018/003869, in part by SPARC Grant SPARC/2018-2019/P291/SL, and
in part by the UGC/CSIR Ph.D. Fellowship, Government of India. This article
was recommended by Associate Editor L. Hernandez. (Corresponding author:
Karun Rawat.)
Nishant Kumar and Karun Rawat are with the Department of Electron-
ics and Communication Engineering, IIT Roorkee, Roorkee 247667, India
(e-mail: nishantseth07@gmail.com; karun.rawat.in@ieee.org).
Fadhel M. Ghannouchi is with iRadio Laboratory, Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering, Schulich School of Engineering, University of
Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada (e-mail: fghannou@ucalgary.ca).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this article are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCSI.2020.2973573
1549-8328 © 2020 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
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1
with smaller bandwidths [2]. These sub-carriers are then
transmitted in the free band available within the spectrum.
Therefore, a transmitter must support concurrent multi-band
transmission to transmit these sub-carriers simultaneously.
Moreover, the availability of these free bands for transmission
may change rapidly depending upon the usage of other service
providers [2]. Therefore, the transmitter must incorporate a
reconfiguration scheme, where the center frequency and the
spacing between carriers can be updated as per the availability
of free bands. In such transmitters, the delta-sigma modula-
tion (DSM) technique is used to achieve high efficiency at
the amplification stage. DSM converts the envelope varying
high peak to average power ratio (PAPR) signals into a
constant envelope or low PAPR signals and allows the power
amplifier (PA) to operate near the saturation region to get the
maximum efficiency [3], [4]. The flexible architecture of DSM
gives the additional advantage of reconfiguring the carrier
positions by changing the zero’s positions of the noise transfer
function (NTF) [5]–[8].
Several research papers have been published recently
addressing concurrent multi-band transmission [9]–[14]. The
multi-band concurrent transmission of several carriers in case
of all-digital transmitter is straight forward where several DSM
outputs generated by different DSM modulators operating in
parallel mode are serialized into a single bitstream and upcon-
verted by multiplexer or serializer before sending to single PA
for amplification. This scheme is proposed in [11], [14] for
dual-band case. Such a scheme utilizes high-speed serializer
or multiplexers (MUX) with high sampling frequency, which
is at least four times the required carrier frequency. This
integral relationship between the sampling frequency of DSM
and serializer/MUX restricts the freedom of aggregating the
multiple carriers to any arbitrary frequencies. Moreover, for
changing the positions of carriers and spacing between them,
this technique requires frequent adaptation/rearrangement in
the sequence of I/Q data in the “select & combine” block
before serializer/MUX. An efficient concurrent dual-band
DSM transmitter with digital outphasing is proposed in [12].
This utilizes band-pass DSM, radio frequency (RF) pulse
width modulation (PWM) along with outphasing to enhance
coding, as well as the average power efficiency of the multi-
band transmitters. However, the multi-band aggregated carriers
are obtained by combining the output of several outphas-
ing PAs using an outphasing combiner. A large number of
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2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS–I: REGULAR PAPERS
modulation stages and PA units results in complex transmitter
architecture [12]. Moreover, poor combiner efficiency may
cause degradation in overall transmitter performance. A fully
digital parallel DSM architecture is further proposed for
multi-band transmission [13]. This implements a concurrent
triple-band transmission for contiguous and non-contiguous
carrier aggregation scenarios and uses several PAs and a
combiner at their output. The implementation is real-time
using field programmable gate array (FPGA). However, this
parallel DSM architecture required a large number of hardware
resources.
This paper explores an alternative approach, where one can
transmit multiple carriers simultaneously by modifying the
DSM transfer function to present multiple pass-bands. In such
a case, a single RF chain with one set of DSM can be used
for signal upconversion and amplification resulting in low
complexity. Some initial efforts have been carried out using
this approach but limited to dual-band applications [6]. This
DSM transmitter is tunable, but frequency reconfigurability
is limited due to the integral relationship between baseband
sampling frequency and serializer sampling frequency due to
its all-digital architecture [6].
In addition, for multi-band concurrent transmission, it is
essential to reduce the quantization noise between the adjacent
channels. This cannot be completely removed by merely
increasing the level of DSM and may require an additional
noise shaping function [15], [16]. In single-band DSM trans-
mission, out-of-band quantization noise can also be suppressed
by introducing an additional noise shaping function [15].
This scheme cannot be used for concurrent multi-band cases
where the target is to suppress noise, particularly between
the multiple bands, which are also reconfigurable. Therefore,
the additional noise shaping for multi-band case requires a
filter producing multiple stop-band notches which are recon-
figurable to adapt according to the change in frequency of
transmission bands. Moreover, this filter should not introduce
high envelope variation compromising with the PA efficiency.
This paper presents a transmitter architecture using recon-
figurable multi-band DSM (RMB-DSM), which can handle
multiple carriers concurrently for applications such as carrier
aggregation in 5G. A new 4th order DSM transfer function
is formulated, which converts the four aggregated carriers in
the baseband to a single 3-level DSM signal. The selected
positions of poles and zeros in the proposed 4th order DSM
will help in minimizing the order to DSM for transmission
of the higher number of bands without compromising the
performance in comparison to [13]. The performance in terms
of coding efficiency (CE) and signal to noise distortion
ratio (SNDR) is also evaluated for the selected location
of these poles and zeros. The CE and SNDR are defined
as:
Signal Power
CE =
Signal Power + Quanti zati on Noi se Power
(1)
 
Signal Power
S N D R = 10 log
I nband Noi se and Di stor ti on Power
(2)
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An augmented noise shaping (ANS) block with reconfig-
urable multiple notches is introduced additionally to suppress
the quantization noise between closely spaced transmission
bands. This significantly improves CE at the expense of
small envelope variation added. Therefore, this paper also
analyzes the performance in terms of CE and PAPR of the
3-level DSM with proposed ANS and 4-level DSM without
any ANS. It is validated that the addition of the proposed
ANS scheme can significantly increase CE while keeping the
envelope variation below 4-level DSM. This further operates
the PA with better average power efficiency. Therefore, a sig-
nificant improvement in the overall transmitter efficiency is
validated with the proposed ANS block. In fact, the perfor-
mance using ANS is better than using the next higher-level
DSM.
The proposed technique used a single RF chain for DSM
modulation, frequency upconversion, and amplification. To the
best of authors’ knowledge, for the first time, four long term
evolution (LTE) carriers of 15 MHz are simultaneously trans-
mitted with an aggregated bandwidth of 60 MHz using DSM
transmitter architecture with single RF chain. The proposed
scheme is experimentally validated in hardware, furthermore,
the scheme offers reconfiguration of up to four pass-bands to
any frequency within the tuning range of ± f D S M / 2 around
the carrier frequency set by the quadrature upconverter. The
f D S M is the sampling frequency of DSM. Here, the DSM
sampling frequency f D S M only decides the tuning range of
carriers which can be allocated around any RF frequency
based on the local oscillator (LO) frequency of the quadrature
modulator.
II. P ROPOSED R ECONFIGURABLE M ULTI -BAND DSM
T RANSMITTER FOR C ONCURRENT T RANSMISSION
The concurrent multi-band transmitter using a single set of
DSM and an RF chain is shown in Fig. 1. The architecture
consists of a baseband carrier aggregation unit where carriers
are aggregated, followed by a DSM conversion block. The
output of the DSM conversion block in the form of in-phase
(I ) and quadrature components (Q) feeds quadrature upcon-
verter which translates the multiple bands to the desired carrier
frequencies. These multiple carriers are then amplified by
PA, followed by a band-pass filter (BPF) to reconstruct the
envelope before transmission. Fig. 1 shows that four baseband
signals are placed to a different intermediate frequency (IF)
in the digital domain and then aggregated to form a new
signal having four carriers at different IF, i.e., f I F 1 , f I F 2 ,
f I F 3 , f I F 4 . This signal is then converted into a 3-level DSM
signal using the proposed single 4th order DSM function. Each
I and Q component of signals with aggregated carriers will
pass through 4th order DSM followed by ANS function in a
DSM conversion block, as shown in Fig. 1. One can see from
Fig. 1 that the four baseband signals are configured in four
IF between ± f D S M / 2. The 4th order DSM NTF is reconfig-
ured accordingly to create zeros at the required pass-bands;
whereas, the ANS will reconfigure to create multiple notches
between these pass-bands to reduce inter-band quantization
noise present between the adjacent transmission bands.
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KUMAR et al.: RECONFIGURABLE DIGITAL DSM TRANSMITTER ARCHITECTURE
Fig. 1. Proposed reconfigurable transmitter architecture for concurrent multi-band transmission using RMB-DSM.
The baseband carrier aggregation block in Fig. 1 com-
prises of interpolator, IF-shifter, signal combiner. All the four
baseband signals correspond to either four different carriers
or four sub-carriers of any signal with large bandwidth.
In Fig. 1 the input digital baseband signals BS1 , BS2 , BS3 ,
BS4 , in the complex form (I B S + j ∗ Q B S ), are sampled at
baseband sampling frequency fb1 , fb2 , f b3 , fb4 , respectively.
These baseband signals are interpolated with a different inter-
polation factor to get the same baseband sampling frequency,
which is equal to the sampling frequency of RMB-DSM,
i.e., f D S M . For example, baseband signal BS1 is interpolated
by factor N1 , BS2 by N2 , BS3 by N3 , and BS4 by N4 , as shown
in Fig. 1. The values of the interpolation factor N1 to N4 can
have integer or non-integer values and needs to be updated
whenever the baseband sampling frequency of any baseband
signal is changed. After interpolation, all baseband signals are
shifted to appropriate IFs using IF shifter. If f n,i represents
the normalized frequency at which the NTF of DSM will
configure zeros and f I F i is the IF shift for i th baseband signal,
one can write the output of IF shifter as:
B SI F i (n) = B Si (n)∗ e(2nπ f n,i f D S M )
where,
fI Fi
f n,i =
fDS M
These IF shifted baseband signals are then combined,
as shown in Fig. 1 and later IQ splitter splits the signal into
I and Q signals before sending it to the DSM conversion
block. For reconfiguring the carrier positions, the positions of
zeros can be updated by updating the RMB-DSM coefficients
using a look-up table (LUT) in the DSM conversion block
shown in Fig. 1. The transfer function of the ANS block
is also reconfigured according to the pass-band created in
the RMB-DSM in order to reduce the quantization noise in
between the pass-bands. The design of ANS is also important
to guarantee an appropriate gap between various pass-bands
and the bandwidth of pass-band. The detailed theoretical
analysis of 4th order RMB-DSM and ANS is discussed in
the next section.
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3
Since the IF frequencies are assigned digitally, the four
baseband signals can be configured to any IF frequency
between the range of ± f D S M / 2. Although, the two pair of
zeros (notches) of NTF is always symmetrically placed; yet,
the gap between them can be varied to have several combina-
tions of multiple frequencies where these pass-bands can be
configured within a tuning range of ± f D S M /2. It is worth
mentioning that the DSM generation block is independent of
the baseband signal generation. Since the DSM generation
block only configures multiple pass-bands according to the IF
assigned to the baseband signals, any component carrier can
be placed in any order to these four bands. Thus, depending on
the baseband signal generation, which can be independent of
their assignment of IF frequencies, one can practically use this
setup for LTE carrier aggregation. One can also down-scale
these multiple bands from four simultaneous bands to three,
two, and single passband by controlling the gap between the
passbands.
Each I and Q signals after 4th order DSM and ANS will
be converted into respective analog signals using digital to
analog converters (DACs) and fed to quadrature upconverter
(3) as shown in Fig. 1. The quadrature upconverter translates the
aggregated carriers around RF carrier frequency f C0 set by
LO of quadrature upconverter. One can see that f C0 can be
(4) selected independent of DSM sampling frequency in case of
quadrature upconversion based architecture and the position
of carriers can be changed with a very small frequency step,
as shown in Fig. 1.
It is worth mentioning that the poles and zeros positions of
the NTF play an important role in deciding the performance
of the transmitter in terms of SNDR and CE. The linearity
and efficiency of the proposed scheme are calculated in
terms of CE and SNDR. In the case of concurrent multi-
band transmitter, the aggregated channel efficiency (CH E) is
important which can be calculated by considering only signal
power measured within transmission bands and represented as:
4 
 f ci +B W/2
f ci −B W/2 Pout ( f )
Pchannel i=1
ηC H E = = (5)
PDC PDC
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4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS–I: REGULAR PAPERS
Fig. 2. Reconfigurable 4th order RMB-DSM architecture.
where Pchannel is channel power of all four bands, Pout is the
output power of PA located in the frequency range of f , fci
is the center frequency of the i t h carrier, BW is the bandwidth
of carrier and PDC is the measured DC power consumption
of the PA. C H E of transmitter gives a reasonable comparison
between DSM and conventional transmitter architecture and
therefore used for benchmarking the performance.
III. T HEORETICAL A NALYSIS OF P ROPOSED RMB-DSM
& AUGMENTED N OISE S HAPING
The theoretical analysis of the 4th
order RMB-DSM struc-
ture for concurrent multi-band transmission is discussed in this
section. The optimum design of the ANS filter to improve
CE is also discussed in this section. It has been established
that a careful design of ANS can present better CE in the
case of 3-level DSM with much lower envelope variation in
many cases as compared to the conventional 4-level DSM. The
generalized transfer function of DSM is defined as [17]:
Y (z) = ST F(z)X (z) + N T F(z) E(z)
where X (z) is envelope varying input signal, Y (z) is the
quantized pulsed shaped output and E(z) represents the quanti-
zation noise generated by quantizer Q(n). STF(z) and NTF(z)
represents the signal transfer function (STF) and NTF of
RMB-DSM, respectively. In Fig. 1, two RMB-DSM blocks
with the same architecture are used to modulate respective
I and Q components of the aggregated signal. Therefore,
X (z) in (6) represents either I or Q component of aggregated
carriers. The positions of zeros for NTF(z) are calculated by
the numerator of N th order NTF(z), represented as:
N T Fnum (z) = 1 + K 1 Z −1 + K 2 Z −2
+ K 3 Z −3 . . . . . . . . . + K N Z −N
where, K 1 , K 2 , ……K N are the coefficients used for calcu-
lating the roots of (7). The roots of NTF(z) in (7) represent
the values of available complex valued zeros. The positions
of these zeros are reconfigured by varying the values of the
coefficients. The order of DSM is equal to the number of
available zeros. These zeros can be placed at the desired
normalized notch frequency to decrease the quantization noise
level by introducing a notch at that frequency. The carrier can
be placed at this normalized notch frequency. The relation
between complex zero and normalized notch frequency is
given as [5]:
Z = α + jβ = H e j 2π f n
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where, H is the magnitude of complex zero and f n is the
normalized notch frequency defined in (4). In order to maintain
the stability, all the poles must lie inside the unity circle, and
zeros must lie on the unity circle, which means H =1. Thus,
the required normalized notch frequency f n can be calculated
by selecting the appropriate values of ‘α’ and ‘β’, while
maintaining the magnitude of complex zero i.e. H =1. In such
a case, the relation between normalized notch frequency
f n and complex-valued zero becomes:
Z = α + jβ = e j 2π f n (9)
cos(2π f n ) + j sin(2π f n ) = α + jβ (10)
Hence, if normalized notch frequency is known, then the
position of zeros can be calculated using (9) & (10). For
transmission of N aggregated carriers, N number of zeros
in NTF of RMB-DSM is required at different normalized
frequency. In this paper, 4th order NTF is calculated, and
therefore, a maximum of four notches can be generated at
different IF frequencies. For reconfiguring the number of
(6) aggregated carriers and their positions, a LUT is used to update
the pre-calculated parameters of RMB-DSM and ANS. The
reconfigurability in terms of the number of carriers gives an
extra advantage in such transmitters compared to transmitter
architecture discussed in the literature. The following sub-
section describes the scheme for placing the zeros of 4th order
RMB-DSM in such a manner that several carriers can be
aggregated at the frequencies corresponding to these zeros.
A. Proposed 4t h Order RMB-DSM
Fig. 2 shows the architecture of the 4th order RMB-DSM,
which can be used for multi-band (quad, dual) as well as
single-band transmission. The parameters a, a1 , a2 , a3 , a4 ,
b, b1 , c, c1 , c2 , c3 , c4 , d, g1 , g2 , used in RMB-DSM archi-
(7) tecture decides the operating configuration of RMB-DSM.
These parameters are updated according to the number of
transmitting bands and the required notch frequencies. For
the calculation of these coefficients in case of quad-band
transmission, let’s assume the required notch frequencies are
f n1 , f n2 , f n3 , and f n4 . The corresponding zero position for
these notch frequencies can be calculated using (9) & (10).
The transfer function of 4th order RMB-DSM, STF(z) and
NTF(z) given in (6) can be calculated using these zeros values
and expressed as:
B1
ST F(z) = (11)
A5 z + A4 z + A3 z 2 + A2 z + A1
4 3
P5 z 4 + P4 z 3 + P3 z 2 + P2 z + P1
N T F(z) = (12)
(8) A5 z 4 + A4 z 3 + A3 z 2 + A2 z + A1
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KUMAR et al.: RECONFIGURABLE DIGITAL DSM TRANSMITTER ARCHITECTURE
Fig. 3. Details of NTF(z): (a) Pole-zero plot for single and concurrent dual-band transmission, (b) magnitude response of NTF(z) for single and concurrent
dual-band transmission, (c) Pole-zero plot for concurrent quad-band transmission and (d) magnitude response of NTF(z) for concurrent quad-band transmission.
where A1 , A2 , A3 , A4 , A5 , B1 , P1 , P2 , P3 , P4 , P5 , are the
coefficients of RMB-DSM. The detailed explanation of the
calculation of these coefficients using calculated zeros values
is given in the appendix.
Fig. 3 shows the pole-zero plot and magnitude spectrum
of NTF(z) of the 4th order RMB-DSM in case of a single-
band, dual-band and four band transmission. For transmission
of single-band in low pass configuration, all the zeros must
be located at normalized frequency f n = 0. In the case of
concurrent dual-band transmission, additional zeros can benefit
in rejecting in-band quantization noise. For example, if double
zeros are placed at each normalized IF bands a deep notch can
be realized to reduce the in-band quantization noise.
Fig. 3(a) & (b) show the position of zeros and correspond-
ing notches for single and dual-band transmission. Fig. 3(c)
depicts the positions of zeros for four band transmission,
placed at four different normalized frequencies. Fig. 3(d) illus-
trates the corresponding magnitude spectrum of NTF(z), where
in the first case, the four notches are placed at f n = −0.25,
f n = −0.12, f n = 0.12 and f n = 0.25. This figure also
shows the second case where notches are reconfigured to
f n = −0.36, f n = −0.25, f n = 0.25 and f n = 0.36.
If all the required notch frequencies are known, then the
required complex zero values can be calculated using (9)
and (10). Fig. 4 shows the change in CE, drain efficiency
(DE) and PAPR of DSM output without ANS as the number of
quantization level increases for quad-band transmission when
four bands are located at normalized frequency fn = −0.25,
f n = −0.12, fn = 0.12 and f n = 0.25. As one can see
from Fig. 4 (a) that CE for 3-level DSM is 21% with 55
% DE at 3.2 dB PAPR. Theoretically, the overall efficiency
can be predicted as the multiplication of CE and DE, which
is 11.55 % for the above case. This may improve with the
use of the proposed ANS block which will be discussed in
the next section. However, during measurement when real PA
is used, CH E given in (5) will be used to obtain the overall
efficiency considering measured channel power and DC power
consumption. Fig. 4 (a) shows that the CE is improved by
increasing the number of quantization levels. However, this
will also result in increased envelope variation in DSM output
represented as high PAPR. Due to this increased envelope
variation, PA will work in large power back-off resulting into
poor efficiency. One can see in Fig. 4 (a) that by increasing
the quantization level, the PAPR of DSM modulated signal
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5
Fig. 4. (a) Variation of CE, DE and PAPR by changing the quantization
levels, (b) variation in SNDR with the change in OSR.
increases from 3 to 11 dB, and DE of PA degrades from 55%
to 20 %. Here, the DE is estimated from the measurement of
PA excited with continuous wave (CW) signal [18]. In this
paper, 3-level DSM is used to get the maximum DE at low
PAPR. Similarly, Fig. 4(b) shows that by increasing the OSR
improves the SNDR. Therefore, a high OSR must be selected
to set the maximum SNDR. The OSR is directly proportional
to DSM sampling frequency, and the distribution of out-of-
band quantization noise is equal to the sampling frequency
of DSM. Therefore, the OSR is selected according to the
maximum allowable DSM sampling frequency. The choice of
position for placement of pole of NTF(z) is also important as
it affects the performance parameter i.e CE and SNDR of the
transmitter. The CE and SNDR are also evaluated for 3-level
DSM without ANS with the change in the position of pole
for quad-band transmission when four bands are located at
normalized frequency f n = −0.25, f n = −0.12, fn = 0.12
and f n = 0.25 as shown in Fig. 5.
The variation of CE and SNDR with | r | is shown
in Fig. 5 (a), where, | r | represents the magnitude of the
vector representing the pole position, as shown in Fig. 5 (b).
One can observe that if poles are positioned near to the unity
circle (i.e., | r | ≈ 1), then CE of the modulated signal is
very high, but SNDR is very low. As poles are moved away
from the unity circle (| r | < 1), SNDR starts improving,
and CE starts degrading. Since the CE can be improved
later by reducing quantization noise using ANS block, the
pole positioning is mainly focused on SNDR improvement.
As shown in Fig. 5 (a), the maximum SNDR is achieved
when poles are positioned at the center of the unity circle
(i.e., | r | ≈ 0). Therefore, in this paper, all the poles are placed
at the center of the unity circle for calculation of NTF(z)
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6 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS–I: REGULAR PAPERS
Fig. 5. (a) Variation in CE and SNDR by changing the position of poles,
(b) vector representing the pole position.
Fig. 6. Simulated spectrum for concurrent transmission of four-band at
normalized frequency (a) f n = ±0.36 & f n = ±0.25, (b) f n = ±0.25 &
f n = ±0.12.
where SNDR is best as evident from Fig. 5 (a). Since all the
poles are located at the center of the unity circle, the STF(z)
in (11) can be considered as a simple delay. In NTF(z)
given in (12), by changing the coefficients of the numerator,
the positions of zeros can be varied as per required notch
frequencies.
The simulation results of concurrent quad-band transmission
of four LTE carriers of 15 MHz bandwidth for two cases
are shown in Fig. 6. Here, DSM sampling frequency f D S M
is selected as 983.04 MHz. For proof of concept, here two
carriers are fixed at IF frequencies fn = ±0.25, and the other
two carriers are positioned at IF frequencies f n = ±0.36
as shown in Fig. 6(a) and at f n = ±0.12 in Fig. 6 (b).
In both cases, the quadrature upconverter translates these IF
frequencies around 2 GHz, as shown in Fig. 6 (a) and (b). This
is decided by the LO frequency of the quadrature modulator.
The position of all carriers and the frequency gap between
these carriers can be easily reconfigured by changing the notch
frequency in NTF of RMB-DSM. Fig. 7 shows the different
configurations where carriers are placed at the different carrier
frequencies and different frequency gaps. One can see that
multiple transmission bands are reconfigurable in pairs. How-
ever, the frequency gaps  f 1 and  f 2 can be reconfigured
digitally to place multiple carriers at different frequencies
over the tuning range of ± f D S M /2 around the selected LO
frequency f C0 . However, it is worth mentioning if the pass-
band is created at the extreme edge of this tunable range;
then, the image may appear near to the band at the extreme
edge. In order to avoid such a situation, a sufficient guard
band must be kept at both the edges of the available spectrum.
This will restrict the range of frequency spectrum over which
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Fig. 7. Different configuration for carriers’ positions at different frequency
gaps.
the multiple bands can be created. In Fig. 7, the pair of
bands are represented by the same filled pattern, and one
can see that the positions of these bands can interchange by
changing  f 1 and  f 2 . Moreover, the two bands in the case of
Fig. 7 (b) and (c) can also be merged to achieve a wider band
at center frequency f C0 . There can be several such scenarios
for positioning these multiple bands where any component
carrier can be placed in any order to these multiple bands.
The carrier frequency f C0 can be chosen as high as possible
and independent of the DSM frequency since it depends on
the tunable range of LO frequency. Therefore, the proposed
RMB-DSM offers reconfigurable architecture, where all four
carriers are reconfigured to any position and hence suitable for
carrier aggregation applications.
B. Augmented Noise Shaping
Despite the successful implementation of the carrier aggre-
gation scheme, the level of quantization noise in between the
transmission bands is still very high. Since NTF zeros of
RMB-DSM are mainly used in reducing the in-band noise
within transmission bands, the ANS can be used to reduce
noise between these multiple transmission bands. Otherwise,
a significant amount of DC power consumed in PA will be
wasted in amplifying this quantization noise, which degrades
the overall efficiency of the transmitter. An ANS block is
introduced after RMB-DSM to improve the CE by reducing
the out-of-band quantization noise around each transmission
band. This will, however, add a small envelope variation to
the output of the DSM but improves the overall efficiency of
the transmitter. Since it results in a significant improvement
of CE in comparison to the slight degradation at the ampli-
fication stage anticipated with the increase in PAPR of the
DSM signal. Fig. 8 shows the architecture of ANS consisting
of two magnitude scaling blocks and two delay units with
different delays. The transfer function of ANS can be written
as:

− j ωμ1 α2 − j ωμ −μ 
H (ω) = α1 e 1+ e 2 1 (13)
α1
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KUMAR et al.: RECONFIGURABLE DIGITAL DSM TRANSMITTER ARCHITECTURE 7

Fig. 8. The architecture of ANS block.

where, μ1 and μ2 are the delay factors and α1 and α2 are

magnitude scaling factors, as shown in Fig. 8. The delay
factor μ1 and μ2 can have any integer value and α1 and
α2 are selected in such a way that maximum value of the
signal remains unchanged after ANS. Therefore, the sum of
α1 and α2 is always equal to one. By changing the values of
α1 and α2 , envelope variation is added in the ANS output, and
this will decrease the out-of-band quantization noise and thus
improve the CE. Since the proposed ANS scheme also adds
some envelope variation when applied to 3-level DSM, it is
also compared with conventional 4-level DSM, where no ANS
is applied. Fig. 9 shows the CE and PAPR of the modulated
signal in the case of 3-level DSM with ANS by changing
the α1 ( α2 = 1 − α1 ). The CE and PAPR are evaluated
over the entire range of IF reconfiguration. For comparison,
the performance of 3-level and 4-level DSM without ANS is
also illustrated in Fig. 9. DSM_4L and DSM_3L represent
the 4 and 3-level DSM, respectively, with no ANS applied.
Fig. 9. Performance comparison of 3 and 4 level DSM without ANS and
Whereas, the DSM_3L with ANS represents the case where 3-level DSM with ANS: (a) CE, (b) PAPR.
ANS is applied to 3-level DSM along with various values
of α1 . For a fair comparison, only those cases are considered
where PAPR of with 3-level DSM is either less or equal to
the PAPR of 4-level DSM. In such a case, the PA operates
at the same average power with similar efficiency expected in
both cases. One can see from Fig. 9 (a) that by introducing
ANS in 3-level DSM, the CE increases for any value of
α1 over the entire IF reconfiguration range. In fact, for a
range of ‘α1 ’ given in Fig. 9(a), the performance of 3-level
DSM with ANS is better in terms of CE than 4-level DSM.
Fig. 9 (b) shows the envelope variation added to 3-level DSM
Fig. 10. Simulated spectrum after noise shaping for concurrent transmission
with ANS in terms of PAPR which is compared with 3 and of four band at (a) f n = ±0.25 & f n = ±0.36, (b) f n = ±0.12 & f n =
4-level DSM without ANS. It is obvious that the 3-level DSM ±0.25.
without ANS has the least PAPR over the entire range of
IF reconfiguration. It is worth mentioning that α1 should be
optimally selected, such that it should give CE improvement establishes a fact that the same value of α1 for different
without exceeding the PAPR of 3-level DSM beyond the IF may not be an optimum choice and one can choose
4-level DSM. For example, at IF of 320 MHz, the respective different α1 for different IF to obtain an enhanced CE without
PAPR of 3-level DSM with ANS is less, and CE is 5% better much compromising in increased envelope variation (PAPR)
as compared to conventional 4-level DSM if α1 is chosen as in comparison to 4-level conventional DSM. Fig. 10 shows
0.7. However, at IF of 160 MHz, the PAPR for α1 = 0.5 is the output of the ANS block for 4th order RMB-DSM in the
equal to PAPR of conventional 4-level DSM. However, this case of concurrent transmission of four bands. Two different
value of α1 at 160 MHz IF results in a 9-10% improvement ANS configurations are used, where ANS1 represents the case
in CE as compared to conventional 4-level DSM which can where, α1 is selected 0.7 and in the case of ANS2, α1 is 0.5.
be seen from Fig. 9 (a). It is worth mentioning that while For both ANS1 and ANS2 μ1 is set to be 0 and μ2 is 8. Hence,
plotting Fig. 9, two carriers are fixed at IF frequencies of with the proposed noise shaping technique, the CE and hence
± 245 MHz and the rest of the two IF frequencies are varied the CH E both are improved as evident from measurement
as shown in Fig. 9. From Fig. 9, one can conclude that results in the next section.
the proposed ANS scheme provides better CE improvement The notches introduced by the ANS block must be recon-
with less envelope variation compare to 4-level DSM. This figured with the change in the center frequency of the

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8 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS–I: REGULAR PAPERS
Fig. 11. (a) Frequency response of ANS filter (b) Scenario #1 of carrier
placement in channel available after ANS.
transmission band of DSM. Therefore, the roll-off presented
by these notches will also affect flatness available in the trans-
mission pass-band. In case, where, the transmission bands are
far apart, the effect of ANS notches over the pass-band flatness
is negligible even if several notches are configured by ANS
between the transmission bands. For example, in Fig. 10(a),
four notches are introduced by ANS between the second and
third transmission bands. On the contrary, if the transmission
bands are configured close enough by the DSM transfer func-
tion, as shown in Fig. 10 (b), only two notches by ANS can
be introduced between second and third transmission bands.
In such a case, the roll-off of notches introduced by ANS
may not present any significant degradation in the bandwidth
of transmission bands. Therefore, a large number of notches
should be avoided in case of closely spaced transmission
bands in order to minimize the effect of roll-off of notches
introduced by ANS in the pass-band flatness of transmission
bands. However, if two bands are placed nearby, as shown
in Fig. 7 (b), the level of quantization noise is less between the
carriers, and therefore, one can avoid placing the ANS notch
between the carriers. In this case, ANS notch can be placed
in the side bands. Furthermore, the spacing between various
channels and the effect of the position of notches of ANS are
studied and some of the cases are discussed here. Fig. 11 (a)
shows one such case where ANS produces periodic notches
over the entire tuning range of 983.04 MHz. In such a case, the
bandwidth of the pass-band of this notch filter will decide the
available channel bandwidth and the frequency gap between
them. Depending on the channel bandwidth, one or more
carriers can be aggregated within one channel. This further
also depends on NTF notches configurability, as discussed in
the various scenario in Fig. 7. Fig. 11 (b) shows the scenario
where one of the wideband carriers is placed in each passband
channel. The ε is the flatness of the carrier placed in this
channel. Fig. 12 shows another scenario where carriers can
be placed closer as compared to the case in Fig. 11 (a). It is
worth mentioning that due to ANS implementation in the
digital domain, the periodic notches as shown in Fig. 11 and
12 can be configured to several scenarios effectively able to
cover any frequency point in the tuning range. Since NTF
of 4th order DSM function is also digitally configurable and
can be able to effectively cover any frequency point within
tuning range, one can have multiple combinations to transmit
four carriers concurrently. While transmission, these four
carriers can take any position; however, their frequency gap is
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Fig. 12. The frequency response of ANS filter in scenario #2.
Fig. 13. Test-bed with AWG based platform operating at 983.04 MHz
sampling frequency.
governed by smartly choosing the position of notches of NTF
and ANS.
IV. H ARDWARE D EMONSTRATION & M EASUREMENT
R ESULTS
This section discusses details about the measurement setup
and experimental validation of the proposed scheme. A test-
bed is developed using arbitrary waveform generator (AWG)
Tektronix 70001A, as shown in Fig. 13. The baseband signals
are generated and aggregated to IF frequencies and then
converted to 3-level DSM signal in MATLAB. The I and
Q output of the proposed DSM is stored in the memory
of AWG for playback. The AWG then utilizes its internal
DACs and digital quadrature upconversion feature to translate
the aggregated LTE carriers to the carrier frequency around
2 GHz [19]. This output of AWG is then amplified through a
15W GaN HEMT based wideband PA operating in continuous
Class-F mode using Wolfspeed device CGH27015F [18]. The
operating frequency band of this continuous Class-F PA is
from 1.5 GHz to 2.5 GHz, with DE ranging from 60% to
70%. To drive the PA in the saturation region, three stages
of driver PAs are used, as shown in Fig. 13. First two driver
stages are ZX60-V63+, ZX60-H242+ from mini-circuit, and
the third driver stage is in-house design delivering 1-watt
power while operating in the linear region. The DSM signal
at the output of AWG has an average and peak power of
−19.4 dBm and −13.9 dBm, respectively. The driver stage
provides the 42 dB gain to operate the final stage continuous
Class-F PA in a saturation region with an average and peak
power of 22.6 dBm and 28.1 dBm, respectively. The average
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KUMAR et al.: RECONFIGURABLE DIGITAL DSM TRANSMITTER ARCHITECTURE 9

TABLE I
C OMPARISON OF P ROPOSED T RANSMITTER P ERFORMANCE W ITH THE S TATE - OF -A RT

and peak power at the output of the final stage PA is 34.5 dBm
and 40 dBm respectively as shown in Fig. 13. The spectrum
of the PA output is captured using a vector signal analyzer
(MXA N9020B) from Keysight technologies [20]. Most of
the quantization noise lies in the frequency range equal to
the sampling frequency of RMB-DSM. Therefore, the selected
sampling frequency of RMB-DSM must be in the range of
operating bandwidth of the PA to accurately calculate the
aggregated channel efficiency, as given in (5). Here, the sam-
pling frequency of DSM is selected as 0.983 GHz, which
is nearly equal to the operating bandwidth of the PA [18].
The range of IF frequency varies from − f DSM /2 to f DSM /2.
To calculate the performance parameters of concurrent trans-
mission of four bands at different center frequencies, two
bands are fixed at IF ± 245 MHz around the carrier fre-
quency of 2 GHz. The other two bands are reconfigured from
± 40 MHz to ± 480 MHz IF frequency around carrier fre-
quency for covering frequency band from 1.5 GHz to 2.5 GHz.
For experimental validation, four 15 MHz LTE signals with
12 dB PAPR are used and shifted to different IF frequencies.
The OSR for aggregated carriers is 16.38 (calculated as
f DSM /BW = 983.04/60). Fig. 14. Measured spectrum for concurrent transmission of four-band using
Fig. 14 shows the measured output spectrum for concurrent 4th order RMB-DSM (a) IF = ± 354 MHz & IF = ± 246 MHz (b) IF = ±
118 MHz & IF = ± 246.
transmission of four bands, with and without ANS, for two
such cases. The close-in spectra of one 15 MHz carrier with
LTE spectrum emission masks [21], [22] are also shown RF filtering. Fig. 15 shows the measured CE, CH E, error vector
in Fig 14. In Fig. 14(a), the first two bands are fixed at IF magnitude (EVM), and SNDR at the output of the PA with
± 245 MHz and the other two bands are at IF ± 354 MHz and without ANS for the IF reconfiguration range between
around the carrier frequency of 2 GHz. In Fig. 14(b), the first ± 40 MHz to ± 480 MHz. It is worth mentioning that since
two bands remain at the same position, i.e. ± 245 MHz, four bands are located at four IF frequencies, therefore the
and the other two bands are reconfigured to ± 118 MHz. worst case EVM and SNDR that was measured among all four
One can see from a close in-band spectrum that the adjacent carriers are given in Fig 15. One can observe from Fig. 15 that
channel leakage ratio (ACLR) is greater than −40 dBc near CE lies between 10 to 29% without using any noise shaping
the band edges for both Fig. 14(a) and Fig. 14(b). It is worth algorithm. However, with the use of ANS, CE is improved to
mentioning that this measurement spectrum is without RF 28-40%. In order to analyze the in-band distortion, EVM is
filter, and ACLR performance is expected to improve with the also evaluated, which lies between 2.5 to 3% for the entire IF

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10
Fig. 15. Measured CE, aggregated channel efficiency (CH E), SNDR and
EVM at output PA with and without using ANS.
frequency reconfiguration range, as shown in Fig. 15. Both the
EVM and SNDR values validate the good in-band performance
of the proposed scheme.
Similarly, without ANS application, the CH E is 15-20%
over the entire range of IF reconfiguration. However, when
ANS is used, this improves to 20%-25% corresponding to
8% improvement over the entire range of IF reconfiguration
while maintaining the signal quality in terms of SNDR and
EVM. This is perhaps due to a reduction in noise between
the transmission bands, which was consuming DC power
during unnecessary amplification by the PA. The transmission
of different carriers at different IF frequencies are achieved
by changing the position of zeros at different places. From
Fig. 15 it is clear that by placing zeros closer or at some
distance, the performance of the transmitter is not much
changed.
Table I presents the comparison of the proposed trans-
mitter with the existing state of the art. The comparison is
mostly based on the maximum number of aggregated bands,
quantization level, DSM order, CE, sampling frequency and
CH E. In this work, four carriers are aggregated, which is the
largest in comparison to the previous works. Yet, the num-
ber of quantization levels and sampling frequency used in
this work is lower as compared to state of the art. Also,
this work reports the highest number of aggregated carriers
with the least DSM order. One can also see from Table I,
the proposed scheme is demonstrated with PA operated in
saturation and the results represent the performance with the
nonlinearity of PA. This is unlike most of the cases in the
literature as shown in Table I where no PA is used. Moreover,
in such a case, the average efficiency of the amplification
stage cannot be calculated during measurement. Therefore,
one can see the average efficiency of the transmitter is cal-
culated only in [12] and [23] other than the proposed scheme,
where [23] shows only 4.4% average efficiency for single-band
transmission of 1.25 MHz. Whereas, [12] reports aggregated
channel efficiency of 19 % but only for concurrent dual-band
case with two 15 MHz aggregated carriers. However, in this
work, overall transmitter aggregated channel efficiency is
measured as 20-25% for quad bands with 60 MHZ aggre-
gated bandwidth over the entire range of IF reconfiguration
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS–I: REGULAR PAPERS
using (5). Therefore, the proposed work provides improved
overall transmitter efficiency with large aggregated bandwidth.
In comparison to the state of art for different transmitter
architecture other than DSM (e.g. Doherty PA based system),
this scheme has demonstrated two main features: (a) very high
PAPR signal handling with good overall transmitter efficiency,
(b) handling of a concurrent multi-band transmission without
using any additional linearization techniques to obtain good
EVM.
V. C ONCLUSION
A reconfigurable digital transmitter for concurrent multi-
band transmission up to four LTE carriers is presented. The
analytical derivation and pole-zeros placement for the 4th
order DSM are carried out to facilitate reconfigurability in
terms of zeros of NTF. The zeros of NTF can be reconfig-
ured to any frequency to present notches in the magnitude
spectrum where carriers can be aggregated with minimum
in-band noise. An ANS block is used to improve the out-
of-band quantization noise, lying between the transmission
bands. The proposed ANS scheme reduces the out-of-band
quantization noise by inserting notches in the sidebands and
thereby increasing the CE of DSM. The proposed technique
is validated in simulation and hardware using a commercial
AWG based setup. Up to four LTE carriers of 15 MHz band are
aggregated using the proposed scheme. The proposed scheme
offers reconfigurability in addition to concurrent multi-band
transmission with CE improvement up to 25% in some
cases. The aggregated channel efficiency of the transmitter
at different IF is also calculated in order to benchmark the
overall performance of the proposed transmitter in order to
compare with the conventional transmitter architectures. The
ANS transfer function with appropriate setting of roll-off can
optimize the minimum gap between the transmission bands
with appropriate in-band flatness. Moreover, the maximum
frequency range over which carriers can be configured depends
on DSM sampling frequency. Therefore, the ANS transfer
function, along with maximum DSM frequency, decides the
limitation in terms of scalability of the proposed scheme for
handling a large number of carriers.
A PPENDIX
The STF(z) and NTF(z) of 4th order DSM can be written
as:
B1
ST F(z) = (A1)
A5 z 4 + A4 z 3 + A3 z 2 + A2 z + A1
P5 z 4 + P4 z 3 + P3 z 2 + P2 z + P1
N T F(z) = (A2)
A5 z 4 + A4 z 3 + A3 z 2 + A2 z + A1
Comparing (A1) and (A2) with the transfer function of DSM
architecture shown in Fig. 2 gives
P5 = 1
P4 = −(a + b + c + d)
P3 = g1 + g2 + (a.b) + (b.c) + (c.a)+(a.d)+(b.d)+(c.d)
P2 = −g2 a − g2 b−g1c−g1d −a.b.c−a.b.d −a.c.d −b.c.d
P1 = g1 g2 + g2 ab + g1 cd + abcd
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KUMAR et al.: RECONFIGURABLE DIGITAL DSM TRANSMITTER ARCHITECTURE
TABLE II
VALUES OF PARAMETERS FOR 4th O RDER RMB-DSM
A5 = 1
A4 = (a4 ) − (a + b + c + d)
A3 = a3 + g1 +g2 −a4(a +b+c)+(a.b) + (b.c)+(c.a)
+ (a.d) + (b.d) + (c.d)
A2 = a2 −a3 (a +b)−g2(a +b)−g1c+a4(ab+ac+bc)−abc
− abd − acd − bcd
A1 = a1− a2 a +g1 g2 +a3ab+g2ab+g1cd −a4abc + abcd
B1 = b 1 (A3)
The parameters a, a1 , a2 , a3 , a4 , b, b1 , c, c1 , c2 , c3 , c4 , d, g1,
g2 , are the coefficients as described in Fig. 2. For calculation
of these coefficients, required notch frequencies are assumed
to be f n1 , f n2 , f n3 , and f n4 . The corresponding zero position
for these notch frequencies can be calculated using (9) & (10).
Suppose these zeros are represented as α1 + jβ1, α2 + jβ2,
α3 + jβ3 and α4 + jβ4 . To place all poles at the center of unity
circle, all poles must be equal to ‘0’. In such a case, NTF can
be written as:
(z − (α1 + jβ1 )) . (z − (α2 + jβ2 ))
N T F(z) =
z2
(z − (α3 + jβ3 )) . (z − (α4 + jβ4))
· (A4)
z2
1 mization in  modulation based RF transmitter architectures,” IEEE
ST F(z) = 4
z Dec. 2010.
By comparing coefficients of (A4) with (A1) and (A5) with
(A2), all the coefficients can be calculated. The values of
parameters used for few cases of normalized frequency are
summarized in Table II.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Keysight and Tektronix
India for their support in developing measurement setup under
their educational development program. The authors also
acknowledge the members of the RF & Microwave group, IIT
Roorkee and Linearized Amplifier Technologies and Services
Private Limited for technical support.
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11
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band 1-bit digital transmitter using band-pass delta-sigma modulator,”
in Proc. Eur. Microw. Conf., Oct. 2013, pp. 1523–1526.
Nishant Kumar (Student Member, IEEE) received
the B.Tech. degree in electronics and communication
engineering from Rajasthan Technical University,
Kota, India, in 2010, and the M.Tech. degree from
the Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology,
Bhopal, India, in 2013, with the specialization in
VLSI and embedded system design. He is currently
pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the Department of
Electronics and Communication Engineering, IIT
Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India. His M.Tech. project
was based on the design and analysis of dual core
pipelined processor implementation using FPGA. He is currently working as
a visiting research student with iRadio Lab, Department of Computer and
Electrical Engineering, University of Calgary, Canada. His research interests
include software-defined radio, digital transmitter, digital signal processing,
as well as power amplifier design. His research has resulted in a publication
in reputed journals and conferences and two patents (Under review).
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS–I: REGULAR PAPERS
Karun Rawat (Senior Member, IEEE) received
the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the
University of Calgary, Canada, in 2012. He worked
as a Student Research Assistant and later as a
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow under the Research
Grant of iCORE and CRC Chair at the University of
Calgary. He is currently an Associate Professor with
the Department of Electronics and Communication,
IIT Roorkee, India. Prior to this, he was an Assistant
Professor with the Centre for Applied Research in
Electronics, IIT Delhi, from 2013 to 2014, and a
Scientist at the Space Applications Center, Indian Space Research Organiza-
tion Ahmedabad, from 2003 to 2007. He is also the founding director and
chairman of start-up in the area of linearized power amplifier design and
wireless solutions. His research has resulted in more than 50 publications
in journals and conferences, several invited papers, one published with one
accepted book, and two patents. His current research interests are in the areas
of RF power amplifier and transceiver design, nonlinear device modeling,
RF active and passive circuits design, RFCMOS, and GaN MMIC designs.
He is also a member of the editorial board of the RF and Microwave Computer
Aided Engineering (RFMiCAE) (Wiley). During his Ph.D., he has received
research production award for three consecutive years from 2009 to 2011.
He has also received the Best Design Prize at the 3rd Annual Smart Radio
Challenge in 2010. He has also been part of technical program committee of
several IEEE conferences and organized workshops in the IEEE IMS 2018,
EuMC 2018, and APMC 2016. He was the Technical Program Committee
Chair of the IEEE INDICON 2017. He has been a reviewer of several IEEE
transactions.
Fadhel M. Ghannouchi (Fellow, IEEE) is currently
a Professor, an Alberta Innovate Strategic Chair in
Intelligent RF Technology, a Canada Research Chair
in Green Radio Systems, and the Founding Direc-
tor of iRadio Lab at the Department of Computer
and Electrical Engineering, University of Calgary,
Canada. He also is a part-time Thousand Talents
Special Foreign Expert Professor at the Department
of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Bei-
jing, China. He has published over 750 referred
journal and conference papers, published six-books,
hold 25 US patents (five pending), and co-founded three spin-off companies.
His research activities are in the areas of microwaves electronics, satellite,
wireless, and optical communications. He is a fellow of the Institution of
Engineering and Technology (IET), a fellow of the Canadian Academy of
Engineering (CAE), a fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada (IEC),
and a fellow of the Academy of Science of the Royal Society (FRSC) of
Canada.