Digitaal Intensieve Communicatiecircuits

CMOS technology is digital oriented. With the scaling of technology nodes, the circuits are becoming faster with reduced power supplies. The decreasing power supplies favor a digital oriented circuit, and increasing speed pushes towards time domain signal processing as the time quantization steps decreases. Thus keeping in view these technological directions, different architectures are being investigated for RF transmitters using time-domain digital circuit. Since they are digital in nature, they can be easily integrated with baseband circuits. Their digital nature also makes them more easy to reconfigure for different standards as compare to the analog counterparts. At the present level of CMOS technology available, the minimum delay (that of a CMOS inverter) is not sufficient to satisfy advanced communication standards. To achieve sub-gate delays different solutions of using varactors and interpolation are also investigated.