Digital Complex Delta–Sigma Modulators With Highly Configurable Notches for Multi-Standard Coexistence in Wireless Transmitters

This paper presents a complex delta-sigma modulator (CDSM) designed for integration in a digital transmitter chain targeting multi-standard coexistence with nearby receivers. The use of a DSM has the advantage of increased performance in terms of signal-to-noise-ratio in the band of interest. However, the resulting out-of-band noise becomes an issue for multi-standard coexistence, thus increasing the complexity of the subsequent filtering stage. This constraint could be relaxed in the DSM stage, by placing a complex zero near the frequency band, where a low noise level is needed. This is achieved by cross coupling the in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) channels, thus obtaining a CDSM. A review of known design methods for CDSM revealed limitations regarding the poles/zeros optimization, and the configurability of the complex zeros placement. The proposed architecture introduces two additional cross couplings from the I and Q quantizers outputs in order to decorrelate the zeros placement and the poles optimization problem. Hence, the improved CDSM can be implemented using existing optimization tools, which reduces considerably the number of iterations and the computational effort. In addition, the resulting modulator can target different coexistence scenarios without the need of redesign, unlike other known methods. Simulation results show a noise level reduction of approximately 20-30-dB near specific frequency bands by the proposed CDSM scheme with respect to standard DSM. Finally, we show an efficient coarse/fine configurability mechanism, which is obtained when introducing additional delays in the cross-coupling paths.