Computationally efficient, event-driven simulation of wireless transmitters using a noisy local oscillator

Accurate representation of the spectral content for each signal contributing to a radio frequency (RF) spectrum is vital for accurate simulation of wireless transceivers. In particular for a wireless transmitter, such a representation is necessary to verify the spectral compliance of RF system performance. Furthermore, this allows simulated verification of the contribution budgets by key transmitter components such as the noisy local oscillator upconversion and the signal path thermal and quantization contributions. For an upconversion mixer driven by a noisy local oscillator (LO) clock, the sampling period for a conventional synchronous simulator needs to be much smaller than the LO clock phase jitter, which can be in the order of femtoseconds. This shortcoming can be overcome in an event-driven simulation. This paper presents two such computationally-efficient event-driven simulation techniques that allow for accounting of the LO phase jitter on the spectrum of the transmit RF signal at a lower sampling rate.