The research on the design of the RF front-end for the LTE - Advanced mobile terminals

LTE-Advanced technology is required to support 100MHz channel bandwidth and transfer rates in excess of 1Gbps. The 2.6GHz band is one of the core band of LTE-Advanced technology. This paper provide the detailed design of the RF front-end. The receiver uses the traditional double-conversion superheterodyne structure, while transmitter uses a zero-IF structure, able to obtain high receiver sensitivity and channel selectivity and small size. The tests' results show that the overall system performance is generally satisfactory. In the transmitter, the maximum output power is up to 23dBm and IMD3 is better than 45dB, for the 100MHz 16-QAM signal, the modulation accuracy is better than 4.18%; in the receiver, the gain flatness is less than 2.66dB, for the 5MHz 16-QAM modulated signals within the passband, the modulation accuracy is better than 1.34%. The transceiver switch time is less than 1.72µs.