Digitally controlled oscillator gain estimation for RF-DPLLs in 4G LTE polar transmitters

The gain of a digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) represents a crucial parameter for wideband phase modulators utilized in polar transmitters supporting SC-FDMA in LTE uplink. Accurate normalization of the DCO gain is necessary for a two-point modulation of a RF digital phase-locked loop (DPLL) to not degrade the in-band modulation quality and out-of-band emissions. The DCO gain can change due to process, voltage and temperature effects and therefore has to be estimated during runtime. A common way to estimate the DCO gain is by minimizing the residual error due to phase modulation signal content present in the error feedback signal of the DPLL control loop. This paper derives a simple discrete time, single-rate model of the DCO gain estimation and investigates the behavior and impact on modulation quality for different resource block (RB) allocation scenarios found in LTE uplink transmission. It is shown that the DCO gain estimation is sensitive to modulation signals with contiguous, sparse RB allocation and problems may arise in certain transmission scenarios.