Injection locking in transmitter chips

An interesting titbit of knowledge about direct conversion transmitters is the phenomenon of injection locking. If the transmitter is such that right after the modulation the signal goes to the driver/PA ( i.e there is no up-conversion or filtering of any kind between the PA and the modulator and its associated LO, then feedback from the output can cause ( in a number of cases) the LO frequency to shift and lock to another harmonic of a feedback signal. A number of techniques to alleviate this have been investigated because the direct conversion technique is considered by some to be simple and easy to handle ( keep chip size small). For more information or articles visit our website at http://www.signalpro.biz.