System-aware radio frequency (RF) front ends for wireless communication systems are provided. High complexity communication systems, such as Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) fifth generation (5G)-new radio (NR) systems, impose severe board area, volume, thermal and interference penalties on wireless devices. In the case of 5G-NR, this is due to the number of bands to be supported, the instantaneous bandwidth and spectral efficiency among other parameters. Other communications systems can involve high modulation of other parameters that similarly impose such penalties. Embodiments described herein provide a co-designed RF front end architecture that utilizes system knowledge (e.g., from baseband or other digital control circuitry, from antenna feedback, etc.) to dynamically adjust the parameters of various RF front-end components. System-aware RF front ends are thus able to improve and optimize performance criteria (e.g., to reduce the above penalties in complex communications systems).

Disclosed herein is an innovative multi-layer hybrid/digital MIMO architecture that comprises single-stream or fully-connected (FC) multi-stream beamforming tiles (with RF complex-weights) in the first layer, followed by a fully connected (analog/digital) baseband layer. This architecture overcomes the complexity versus spectral-efficiency tradeoffs of existing hybrid MIMO architectures and enables MIMO stream/user scalability, superior energy-efficiency, and spatial-processing flexibility.

Provided are a radio-frequency integrated chip (RFIC) and a wireless communication device including the RFIC. An RFIC configured to receive a carrier aggregated receive signal having at least first and second carrier signals may include first and second carrier receivers configured to generate, from the receive signal, first and second digital carrier signals, respectively. A phase-locked loop (PLL) may output a first frequency signal having a first frequency to the first carrier receiver and the second carrier receiver. The first and second carrier receivers may include first and second analog mixers, respectively, for translating frequencies of the receive signal, using the first frequency signal and the second frequency signal, respectively. Each of the first and second carrier receivers may further include a digital mixer for further translating the frequencies of the receive signal in the digital domain.

A system includes a Zero IF transmitter having a mixer and a programmable gain stage. The Zero IF transmitter also includes an intermediate stage between the mixer and the programmable gain stage, wherein the intermediate stage is configured to decouple the mixer and the programmable gain stage.

A precursor rejection filter is disclosed. A digital filter is coupled to receive packets from a data source. The filter may operate in one of a first mode or a second mode. In the first mode, the filter may receive communications packets. When operating in the second mode, the filter may receive sensing packets. Furthermore, when operating in the second mode, the filter may cause a precursor of the equivalent impulse response of the transmitter to be attenuated without attenuating the main lobe of the equivalent impulse response of the transmitter.

The disclosure relates to technology for shifting a frequency range of a signal. In one aspect, a circuit comprises a frequency mixer, a frequency synthesizer configured to generate an oscillator signal, a programmable driver, and a controller. The programmable driver is configured to receive the oscillator signal from the frequency synthesizer and to provide the oscillator signal to the oscillator input of the frequency mixer. The programmable driver is configured to have a variable drive strength. The controller is configured to control the drive strength of the programmable driver based on a frequency of the oscillator signal to adjust a rise time and a fall time of the oscillator signal at the oscillator input of the frequency mixer.

A reconfigurable, multi-band hybrid beamforming architecture is introduced. The present invention is related to a Cartesian-Combining architecture to efficiently implement RF beamforming for a single downconversion chain employing direct downconversion in which the Cartesian-Combining architecture is extended to hybrid beamforming and to heterodyne downconversion.

A method is provided. The method, comprises: power amplifying, with at least two parallel power amplifiers, at least two pre-distorted signals each corresponding to a unique transmit band, wherein each power amplifier operates in a unique transmit band; and pre-distorting, with a single pre-distortion system, at least two signals in different transmit bands, where the pre-distortion of each of the at least two signals is based upon a portion of a corresponding power amplified, pre-distorted signal, and where the pre-distortion diminishes certain IMD products in the corresponding power amplified, pre-distorted signal.

Systems, devices, and methods are provided for mixed-mode signal processing that achieves unprecedented levels of out-of-band and in-band interference suppression. Embodiments of the present disclosure mitigate the effects of blockers and jammers, which have surfaced as issues in emerging cognitive radio systems as those networks struggle to co-exist with licensed and unlicensed users.

A radio frequency (RF) front-end receiver having a passive mixer with feed-forward intermodulation distortion cancellation, or at least reduction. An example receiver generally includes a mixer having differential input terminals and differential output terminals and a baseband filter having inputs coupled to the differential output terminals of the mixer. The receiver also includes common-mode sensing circuitry coupled to the differential input terminals of the mixer and configured to sense a common-mode signal of a first differential signal present at the differential input terminals of the mixer. The receiver further includes a conversion circuit coupled to the common-mode sensing circuitry and configured to convert the common-mode signal to a second differential signal presented to the differential output terminals of the mixer and the inputs of the baseband filter.