Conceptually, wireless transmitters and receivers can be divided into two parts: fundamental frequency and radio frequency. The fundamental frequency includes the frequency range of the input signal of the transmitter and the frequency range of the output signal of the receiver. The bandwidth of the fundamental frequency determines the fundamental rate at which data can flow in the system. The base frequency is used to improve the reliability of the data flow and reduce the load imposed by the transmitter on the transmission medium under a specific data transmission rate.

　　Therefore, when designing a fundamental frequency circuit on a PCB, a lot of signal processing engineering knowledge is required. The radio frequency circuit of the transmitter can convert and upconvert the processed baseband signal to the designated channel, and inject this signal into the transmission medium. Conversely, the receiver's RF circuitry can take the signal from the transmission medium and convert and down-convert it to the fundamental frequency.

　　The transmitter has two main PCB design goals:

　　They must emit a certain amount of power while consuming the least amount of power possible.

　　They must not interfere with the normal operation of transceivers in adjacent channels.

　　As far as receivers are concerned, there are three main PCB design goals: first, they must accurately reproduce small signals; second, they must be able to remove interfering signals outside the desired channel; and finally, like transmitters, they consume The power has to be small.

　　Large interference signal of RF circuit simulation

　　The receiver must be sensitive to small signals, even in the presence of large interfering signals (blockers). This occurs when trying to receive a weak or distant transmission while a nearby powerful transmitter is broadcasting on an adjacent channel. The interfering signal may be 60-70dB larger than the expected signal, and can block the reception of the normal signal by a large amount of coverage in the input stage of the receiver, or by causing the receiver to generate too much noise in the input stage. If the receiver is driven into the nonlinear region by the interferer during the input stage, the two problems mentioned above will occur. To avoid these problems, the front end of the receiver must be very linear.

　　Therefore, "linearity" is also an important consideration when designing a receiver on a PCB circuit board. Since the receiver is a narrowband circuit, the nonlinearity is measured as "intermodulation distortion (intermodulation distortion)". This involves driving the input signal with two sine or cosine waves that are close in frequency, inband, and then measure the product of their intermodulation. In general, SPICE is a time-consuming and expensive simulation software, because it must perform many loops to obtain the required frequency resolution to understand the distortion situation.

　　Small expected signal for RF circuit simulation

　　The receiver must be very sensitive to detect small input signals. In general, the input power to the receiver can be as small as 1 μV. The receiver's sensitivity is limited by the noise generated by its input circuitry. Therefore, noise is an important consideration when designing a receiver on a PCB board. Furthermore, the ability to predict noise with simulation tools is essential.

　　Figure 1 shows a typical superheterodyne receiver. The received signal is filtered and then amplified with a low noise amplifier (LNA). This signal is then mixed with the first local oscillator (LO) to convert the signal to an intermediate frequency (IF).

　　The noise performance of the front-end circuit mainly depends on the LNA, mixer and LO. While using traditional SPICE noise analysis, LNA noise can be found, it is useless for mixers and LOs, because the noise in these blocks is heavily affected by the large LO signal.

　　The small input signal requires that the receiver must have a great amplification function, usually requiring a gain as high as 120dB. At such high gains, any signal coupled from the output back to the input can cause problems. An important reason for using a superheterodyne receiver architecture is that it distributes the gain over several frequencies to reduce the chance of coupling. This also makes the frequency of the first LO different from that of the input signal, preventing large interfering signals from "contaminating" the small input signal.

　　In some wireless communication systems, direct conversion or homodyne architectures can replace superheterodyne architectures for different reasons. In this architecture, the RF input signal is directly converted to the fundamental frequency in a single step, so most of the gain is in the fundamental frequency, and the LO is the same frequency as the input signal.

　　In this case, the influence of a small amount of coupling must be understood and a detailed model of "stray signal paths" such as coupling through the substrate, package pins and bondwires must be established ), and the coupling across the power lines.

　　Adjacent channel interference in RF circuit simulation

　　Distortion also plays an important role in transmitters. The nonlinearity created by the transmitter at the output circuit may spread the bandwidth of the transmitted signal across adjacent frequency channels. This phenomenon is called "spectral regrowth". Before the signal reaches the transmitter's power amplifier (PA), its bandwidth is limited; but "intermodulation distortion" within the PA causes the bandwidth to increase again.

　　If the bandwidth is increased too much, the transmitter will not be able to meet the power requirements of its adjacent channels. When transmitting digitally modulated signals, it is practically impossible to use SPICE to predict spectral regrowth. Because transmission operations of about 1000 digital symbols must be simulated to obtain a representative spectrum, and also need to incorporate high frequency carriers, these make SPICE transient analysis impractical.

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