Single-Chip Realization of All-Digital Transmitter Using RFSoC FPGA

This paper presents a new all-digital transmitter completely realized on a single field programmable gate array (FPGA) chip. Radio-frequency System-On-Chip (RF-SoC) based FPGA solution is used in hardware implementation of the RF transmitter. A hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbench setup was used to evaluate the transceiver's performance. This architecture assists in reducing size, weight, power and cost (SWaP-C) requirements since no JESD204 IP interface protocol is used to connect the FPGA to the data converters. To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first RF-SoC FPGA-based digital-RF transmitter realization capable of directly generating RF signals for the sub-6 GHz frequencies. The proposed design enables the implementation of an all-digital RF transmitter using FPGAs.