A low EVM zero-IF RF transmitter for cognitive radio application

A zero-IF transmitter for Cognitive Radio (CR) application is presented. To effectively reduce the interference between Power Amplifier (PA) and Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO), two VCOs are adopted, one is 450 MHz and the other is from 1148 MHz to 1252 MHz with an 8 MHz step, so the frequency of them are different from the operational frequency of PA. The Local Oscillator (LO) of the modulator generated by mixing the signals of the two VCOs has a low phase noise of −82 dBc/Hz with an offset of 1 kHz. The measurement result of the transmitter shows that the Adjacent Channel Power Ratio (ACPR) is less than −47.5 dBc at 27 dBm output, and the Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) is less than 1.7%.