Practical Telecom DAC Testing

Telecommunication applications require high linearity and high bandwidth. A desirable direct conversion radio transmitter, for example, could consist of a DSP processor feeding matched quadrature DACs, followed by a quadrature up-conversion to RF. Ignoring many practical details, this single hardware platform could service a broad spectrum of modulation schemes (AM, FM, QPSK, CDMA, OFDM, etc.). Slight variations of this architecture will appear in most radio transmitter designs.