Up & downconverter drive 5G transceiver performance

They are a paired highly integrated microwave upconverter and downconverter, respectively. These ICs operate over a very wide frequency range with 50 Ω-match from 24 GHz up to 44 GHz, facilitating ease of design and reducing the costs of building a single platform that can cover all 5G mm Wave frequency bands including 28 GHz and 39 GHz.

Additionally, the chipset is capable of flat 1 GHz RF instantaneous bandwidth supporting all broadband services as well as other ultra-wide bandwidth transceiver applications.

Each upconverter and downconverter is highly integrated, comprising I (in-phase) and Q (quadrature-phase) mixers with on-chip programmable quadrature phase-shifter configurable for direct conversion to/from baseband (operable from DC to 6 GHz) or to an IF (operable from 800 MHz to 6 GHz).

Also included on-chip are voltage variable attenuators, transmit PA driver (in the upconverter) and a receive LNA (in the downconverter), LO buffers with x4 frequency multiplier and programmable tracking filters.

Most programmability functions of the devices are controlled via an SPI serial interface. Through this port, these chips also provide a unique capability for each upconverter and downconverter to correct its respective quadrature phase imbalance, hence the usually difficult to suppress sideband emission can be improved from a typical value of 32 dBc, by 10 dB or more.

This results in an unmatched level of microwave radio performance.

The combination of features provides unprecedented flexibility and ease of use while minimising external components, enabling implementation of small form factor systems such as small cells.

The microwave upconverter and the microwave downconverter are ideally suited for the microwave radio platforms that operate in the emerging 28 GHz and 39 GHz 5G wireless infrastructure bands.

The converters’ 1GHz bandwidth capability, along with the upconverter’s OIP3 of more than 20 dBm that supports stringent modulation schemes such as 1024QAM, are necessary to enable multi-Gigabit wireless data.

The chipset benefits other applications such as satellite and earth station broadband communication links, aircraft radios, RF test equipment and radar systems. Superb linearity and image rejection performance are compelling for improved range of microwave transceivers.

Analog Devices also have evaluation boards available for the ADMV1013 and ADMV1014 up & downconverters to help designers quickly evaluate the performance of the devices. The ADMV1013-EVALZ and ADMV1014-EVALZ evaluation boards incorporate the devices respectively along with a microcontroller, low dropout (LDO) regulators, and nanoDAC to allow the quick and easy evaluation of the devices.

The on-board microcontroller allows the user to configure the register map of the devices through the Analysis, Control, Evaluation (ACE) software. The LDO regulators allow the upconverter and downconverter to be powered on by a single supply, and offer power supply ripple rejection.

The nanoDAC allows the user to attenuate the radio frequency (RF) power from the mixer of the ADMV1013 and ADMV1014 without using an external power supply.

Anglia are offering customers a FREE evaluation board and samples of the Wideband Integrated Microwave Up & Downconverters