A Survey of Baseband Architecture for Software Defined Radio

This paper is a survey of recent works that proposes a baseband processor architecture for software defined radio. A classification of different approaches is proposed. The performance of each architecture is also discussed in order to clarify the suitable approaches that meet software-defined radio constraints.

An Efficient Digital Baseband ASIC for Wireless Biomedical Signals Monitoring

A digital baseband Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) (yclic Redundancy Checkis developed for a microchip transponder to transmit signals and temperature levels from biomedical monitoring devices. The transmission protocol is adapted from the ISO/IEC 11784/85 standard. The module has a decimation filter that employs only a single adder-subtractor in its datapath. The filtered output is coded with cyclic redundancy check and transmitted through backscattering Load Shift Keying (LSK) modulation to a reader. Fabricated using the 0.18-μm CMOS technology, the module occupies 0.116 mm2 in chip area (digital baseband: 0.060 mm2, decimation filter: 0.056 mm2), and consumes a total of less than 0.9 μW of power (digital baseband: 0.75 μW, decimation filter: 0.14 μW).

Broadband Baseband Impedance Control for Linearity Enhancement in Microwave Devices

The out-of-band impedance environment is considered to be of paramount importance in engineering the in-band impedance environment. Presenting the frequency independent and constant outof- band impedances across the wide modulation bandwidth is extremely important for reliable device characterization for future wireless systems. This paper presents an out-of-band impedance optimization scheme based on simultaneous engineering of significant baseband components IF1 (twice the modulation frequency) and IF2 (four times the modulation frequency) and higher baseband components such as IF3 (six times the modulation frequency) and IF4 (eight times the modulation frequency) to engineer the in-band impedance environment. The investigations were carried out on a 10W GaN HEMT device driven to deliver a peak envelope power of approximately 40.5dBm under modulated excitation. The presentation of frequency independent baseband impedances to all the significant baseband components whilst maintaining the optimum termination for fundamental tones as well as reactive termination for 2nd harmonic under class-J mode of operation has outlined separate optimum impedances for best intermodulation (IM) linearity.

An Energy Efficient Digital Baseband for Batteryless Remote Control

In this paper, an energy efficient digital baseband circuit for piezoelectric (PE) harvester powered batteryless remote control system is presented. Pulse mode PE harvester, which provides short duration of energy, is adopted to replace conventional chemical battery in wireless remote controller. The transmitter digital baseband repeats the control command transmission once the digital circuit is initiated by the power-on-reset. A power efficient data frame format is proposed to maximize the transmission repetition time. By using the proposed frame format and receiver clock and data recovery method, the receiver baseband is able to decode the command even when the received data has 20% error. The proposed transmitter and receiver baseband are implemented using FPGA and simulation results are presented.

Digital Automatic Gain Control Integrated on WLAN Platform

In this work we present a solution for DAGC (Digital Automatic Gain Control) in WLAN receivers compatible to IEEE 802.11a/g standard. Those standards define communication in 5/2.4 GHz band using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing OFDM modulation scheme. WLAN Transceiver that we have used enables gain control over Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) and a Variable Gain Amplifier (VGA). The control over those signals is performed in our digital baseband processor using dedicated hardware block DAGC. DAGC in this process is used to automatically control the VGA and LNA in order to achieve better signal-to-noise ratio, decrease FER (Frame Error Rate) and hold the average power of the baseband signal close to the desired set point. DAGC function in baseband processor is done in few steps: measuring power levels of baseband samples of an RF signal,accumulating the differences between the measured power level and actual gain setting, adjusting a gain factor of the accumulation, and applying the adjusted gain factor the baseband values. Based on the measurement results of RSSI signal dependence to input power we have concluded that this digital AGC can be implemented applying the simple linearization of the RSSI. This solution is very simple but also effective and reduces complexity and power consumption of the DAGC. This DAGC is implemented and tested both in FPGA and in ASIC as a part of our WLAN baseband processor. Finally, we have integrated this circuit in a compact WLAN PCMCIA board based on MAC and baseband ASIC chips designed from us.

Investigating Simple Multipath Compensation for Frequency Modulated Signals at Lower Frequencies

Radio propagation from point-to-point is affected by the physical channel in many ways. A signal arriving at a destination travels through a number of different paths which are referred to as multi-paths. Research in this area of wireless communications has progressed well over the years with the research taking different angles of focus. By this is meant that some researchers focus on ways of reducing or eluding Multipath effects whilst others focus on ways of mitigating the effects of Multipath through compensation schemes. Baseband processing is seen as one field of signal processing that is cardinal to the advancement of software defined radio technology. This has led to wide research into the carrying out certain algorithms at baseband. This paper considers compensating for Multipath for Frequency Modulated signals. The compensation process is carried out at Radio frequency (RF) and at Quadrature baseband (QBB) and the results are compared. Simulations are carried out using MatLab so as to show the benefits of working at lower QBB frequencies than at RF.

A 24-Bit, 8.1-MS/s D/A Converter for Audio Baseband Channel Applications

This paper study the high-level modelling and design of delta-sigma (ΔΣ) noise shapers for audio Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) so as to eliminate the in-band Signal-to-Noise- Ratio (SNR) degradation that accompany one channel mismatch in audio signal. The converter combines a cascaded digital signal interpolation, a noise-shaping single loop delta-sigma modulator with a 5-bit quantizer resolution in the final stage. To reduce sensitivity of Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) nonlinearities of the last stage, a high pass second order Data Weighted Averaging (R2DWA) is introduced. This paper presents a MATLAB description modelling approach of the proposed DAC architecture with low distortion and swing suppression integrator designs. The ΔΣ Modulator design can be configured as a 3rd-order and allows 24-bit PCM at sampling rate of 64 kHz for Digital Video Disc (DVD) audio application. The modeling approach provides 139.38 dB of dynamic range for a 32 kHz signal band at -1.6 dBFS input signal level.

Low Power Digital System for Reconfigurable Neural Recording System

A digital system is proposed for low power 100- channel neural recording system in this paper, which consists of 100 amplifiers, 100 analog-to-digital converters (ADC), digital controller and baseband, transceiver for data link and RF command link. The proposed system is designed in a 0.18 μm CMOS process and 65 nm CMOS process.

RF Power Consumption Emulation Optimized with Interval Valued Homotopies

This paper presents a methodology towards the emulation of the electrical power consumption of the RF device during the cellular phone/handset transmission mode using the LTE technology. The emulation methodology takes the physical environmental variables and the logical interface between the baseband and the RF system as inputs to compute the emulated power dissipation of the RF device. The emulated power, in between the measured points corresponding to the discrete values of the logical interface parameters is computed as a polynomial interpolation using polynomial basis functions. The evaluation of polynomial and spline curve fitting models showed a respective divergence (test error) of 8% and 0.02% from the physically measured power consumption. The precisions of the instruments used for the physical measurements have been modeled as intervals. We have been able to model the power consumption of the RF device operating at 5MHz using homotopy between 2 continuous power consumptions of the RF device operating at the bandwidths 3MHz and 10MHz.

Retrospective Synthetic Focusing with Correlation Weighting for Very High Frame Rate Ultrasound

The need of high frame-rate imaging has been triggered by the new applications of ultrasound imaging to transient elastography and real-time 3D ultrasound. Using plane wave excitation (PWE) is one of the methods to achieve very high frame-rate imaging since an image can be formed with a single insonification. However, due to the lack of transmit focusing, the image quality with PWE is lower compared with those using conventional focused transmission. To solve this problem, we propose a filter-retrieved transmit focusing (FRF) technique combined with cross-correlation weighting (FRF+CC weighting) for high frame-rate imaging with PWE. A restrospective focusing filter is designed to simultaneously minimize the predefined sidelobe energy associated with single PWE and the filter energy related to the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR). This filter attempts to maintain the mainlobe signals and to reduce the sidelobe ones, which gives similar mainlobe signals and different sidelobes between the original PWE and the FRF baseband data. Normalized cross-correlation coefficient at zero lag is calculated to quantify the degree of similarity at each imaging point and used as a weighting matrix to the FRF baseband data to further suppress sidelobes, thus improving the filter-retrieved focusing quality.