Machine Learning based Signal Generation Strategies for High-Speed Optical Transmitters

Optical communication is the only viable solution to respond to the demand for a high bit rate and long transmission distance. Directly modulated lasers (DMLs) are a cheap solution for modulating the light in optical fibre. Moreover, their hardware is simpler than externally modulated lasers. However, DML is inherently chirped and the transmission length with high bit rate is limited. This work explores and implements neural networks based signal predistortion schemes to create transmitters

Novel power amplifier design using non-linear microwave characterisation and measurement techniques

This thesis, addresses some aspects of the well-known, problem, experienced by designer of radio frequency power amplifiers (RFPA): the efficiency/linearity trade-off. The thesis is focused on finding and documenting solution to linearity problem than can be used to advance the performance of radio frequency (RF) and microwave systems used by the wireless communication industry. The research work, this was undertaken by performing a detailed investigation of the behaviour of transistors, under complex modulation, when subjected to time varying baseband signals at their output terminal: This is what in this thesis will be referred to as “baseband injection”. To undertake this study a new approach to the characterisation of non-linear devices (NLD) in the radio frequency (RF) region, such as transistors, designated as device-under-test (DUT), subjected to time varying baseband signals at its output terminal, was implemented. The study was focused on transistors that are used in implementing RF power amplifiers (RFPA) for base station applications. The nonlinear device under test (NL-DUT) is a generalisation to include transistors and other nonlinear devices under test. Throughout this thesis, transistors will be referred to as ‘device’ or ‘radio frequency power amplifier (RFPA) device’. During baseband injection investigations the device is perturbed by multi-tone modulated RF signals of different complexities. The wireless communication industry is very familiar with these kinds of devices and signals. Also familiar to the industry are the effects that arise when these kind of signal perturb these devices, such as inter-modulation distortion and linearity, power consumption/dissipation and efficiency, spectral re-growth and spectral efficiency, memory effects and trapping effects. While the concept of using baseband injection to linearize RFPAs is not new the mathematical framework introduced and applied in this work is novel. This novel approach NOVEL POWER AMPLIFIER DESIGN USING NON-LINEAR MICROWAVE CHARACTERISATION AND MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUES CARDIFF UNIVERISTY - UK ABSTRACT vi has provided new insight to this very complex problem and highlighted solutions to how it could be a usable technique in practical amplifiers. In this thesis a very rigorous and complex investigative mathematical and measurement analysis on RFPA response to applied complex stimulus in a special domain called the envelope domain was conducted. A novel generic formulation that can ‘engineer’ signal waveforms by using special control keys with which to provide solution to some of the problems highlighted above is presented. The formulation is based on specific background principles, identified from the result of both mathematical theoretical analysis and detailed experimental device characterisation

Digitally-Modulated Transmitter for Wireless Communications

With the increased digital processing capabilities of sub-micron CMOS nodes, pushing the digital world towards the antenna is becoming attractive, enabling higher reconfigurability of the transmitter, therefore, more degrees of freedom to end-users. More specifically, by adopting an RF-DAC (DAC working at RF frequency) instead of the traditional Power Amplifier block allows for increased performance of the whole transmitter. Hence, a polar transmitter is being studied and an implementation in 130 nm CMOS node is expected

PAPR and ICI reduction techniques for OFDM based satellite communication systems

Multi-carrier systems such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) are significantly affected by peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR). Unfortunately, the high PAPR inherent to OFDM signals envelopes will occasionally drive high power amplifiers (HPAs) to operate in the nonlinear region of their characteristic curve. The nonlinearity of the HPA exhibits amplitude and phase distortions, which cause loss of orthogonality among the subcarriers (SCs), and hence, inter-carrier interference (ICI) is introduced in the transmitted signal. The ICI power is proportional to the amplitude of the signal at the amplifier input and it may cause a considerable bit error rate (BER) degradation. A plethora of research has been devoted to reduce the performance degradation due to the PAPR problem inherent to OFDM systems. Some of the reported techniques such as amplitude clipping have low-complexity; on the other hand, they suffer from various problems such as in-band distortion and out-of-band expansion. Signal companding methods have low-complexity, good distortion and spectral properties; however, they have limited PAPR reduction capabilities. Advanced techniques such as coding, partial transmit sequences (PTS) and selected mapping (SLM) have also been considered for PAPR reduction. Such techniques are efficient and distortionless, nevertheless, their computational complexity is high and requires the transmission of several side information (SI) bits. In this thesis, a new low-complexity scheme is proposed based on the PTS that employs two inverse fast Fourier transforms (IFFTs) and two circulant transform matrices, in order to reduce complexity and improve the system performance. Furthermore, the low-complexity scheme is simplified by omitting one of the circulant transform matrices in order to reduce both the computational complexity and the number of SI bits at the cost of a small reduction in PAPR and BER performance. It is well known that, accurate PAPR estimation requires oversampling of the transmitted signal, which in turn results in increased complexity. More importantly, minimising the PAPR does not necessarily minimise the distortion produced by the nonlinearity of the HPA. Therefore, minimising PAPR does not necessarily imply that the BER will be minimised too. Efficient and less complex schemes for BER reduction of OFDM systems in the presence of nonlinear HPA and/or carrier frequency offset (CFO) are proposed. These proposed techniques are based on predicting the distortion introduced by the nonlinearity of HPA and/or CFO. Subsequently, techniques such as the PTS and SLM are invoked to minimise the distortion and BER. Three distortion metrics are adopted in this thesis: inter-modulation distortion (IMD), peak interference-to-carrier ratio (PICR) and distortion-to-signal power ratio (DSR). Monte Carlo simulations will confirm that the DSR and PICR are more reliable than the PAPR and IMD for selecting the coefficients of the PTS and SLM to minimise the BER. Furthermore, complexity analyses demonstrate that the proposed schemes offer significant complexity reduction when compared to standard PAPR-based methods. A closed form solution for accurate BER for the OFDM signals perturbed by both the HPA nonlinearity and CFO was derived. Good agreement between the simulation results and the theoretical analysis can be obtained for different HPA parameters and CFOs. Finally, efficient approaches to reduce the impact of nonlinear power amplifiers with respect to the BER of OFDM systems are proposed. These are approaches based on: the well-established PAPR schemes, a power amplifier model and a simple single point cross correlator. The optimum phase sequence within the proposed approaches is selected by maximising the correlation between the input and output of the power amplifier model. Simulation results have confirmed that the BER using the proposed approaches is almost identical to the DSR, while the complexity is reduced significantly for particular system configurations.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Engineering evaluations and studies. Volume 3: Exhibit C

High rate multiplexes asymmetry and jitter, data-dependent amplitude variations, and transition density are discussed

Active Backscattering Positioning System Using Innovative Harmonic Oscillator Tags for Future Internet of Things: Theory and Experiments

RÉSUMÉ D'ici 2020, l'Internet des objets (IoT) permettra probablement de créer 25 milliards d'objets connectés, 44 ZB de données et de débloquer 11 000 milliards de dollars d’opportunités commerciales. Par conséquent, ce sujet a suscité d’énormes intérêts de recherche dans le monde académique entier. L'une des technologies clés pour l'IoT concerne le positionnement physique intérieur précis. Le principal objectif dans ce domaine est le développement d'un système de positionnement intérieur avec une grande précision, une haute résolution, un fonctionnement à plusieurs cibles, un faible coût, un faible encombrement et une faible consommation d'énergie. Le système de positionnement intérieur conventionnel basé sur les technologies de Wi-Fi ou d'identification par radiofréquence (RFID) ne peut répondre à ces exigences. Principalement parce que leur appareil et leur signal ne sont pas conçus spécialement pour atteindre les objectifs visés. Les chercheurs ont découvert qu'en mettant en oeuvre de différents types de modulation sur les étiquettes, le radar à onde continue (CW) et ses dérivés deviennent des solutions prometteuses. Les activités de recherche présentées dans cette thèse sont menées dans le but de développer des systèmes de positionnement en intérieur bidimensionnel (2-D) à plusieurs cibles basées sur des étiquettes actives à rétrodiffusion harmonique avec une technique à onde continue modulée en fréquence (FMCW). Les contributions de cette thèse peuvent être résumées comme suit: Tout d'abord, la conception d'un circuit actif harmonique, plus spécifiquement une classe d'oscillateurs harmoniques innovants utilisée comme composant central des étiquettes actives dans notre système, implique une méthodologie de conception de signal de grande taille et des installations de caractérisation. L’analyseur de réseau à grand signal (LSNA) est un instrument émergent basé sur les fondements théoriques du cadre de distorsion polyharmonique (PHD). Bien qu'ils soient disponibles dans le commerce depuis 2008, des organismes de normalisation et de recherche tels que l’Institut national des normes et de la technologie (NIST) des États-Unis travaillent toujours à la mise au point d'un standard largement reconnu permettant d'évaluer et de comparer leurs performances. Dans ce travail, un artefact de génération multi-harmonique pour la vérification LSNA est développé. C'est un dispositif actif capable de générer les 5 premières harmoniques d'un signal d'entrée avec une réponse ultra-stables en amplitude et en phase, quelle que soit la variation de l'impédance de la charge.----------ABSTRACT By 2020, the internet of things (IoT) will probably enable 25 billion connected objects, create 44 ZB data and unlock 11 trillion US dollar business opportunities. Therefore, this topic has been attracting tremendous research interests in the entire academic world. One of the key enabling technologies for IoT is concerned with accurate indoor physical positioning. The development of such an indoor positioning system with high accuracy, high resolution, multitarget operation, low cost, small footprint, and low power consumption is the major objective in this area. The conventional indoor positioning system based on WiFi or radiofrequency identification (RFID) technology cannot fulfill these requirements mainly because their device and signal are not purposely designed for achieving the targeted goals. Researchers have found that by implementing different types of modulation on the tags, continuous-wave (CW) radar and its derivatives become promising solutions. The research activities presented in this Ph.D. thesis are carried out towards the goal of developing multitarget two-dimensional (2-D) indoor positioning systems based on harmonic backscattering active tags together with a frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) technique. Research contributions of this thesis can be summarized as follows: First of all, the design of a harmonic active circuit, more specifically, a class of innovative harmonic oscillators used as the core component of active tags in our system, involves a large signal design methodology and characterization facilities. The large signal network analyzer (LSNA) is an emerging instrument based on the theoretical foundation for the Poly-Harmonic Distortion (PHD) framework. Although they have been commercially available since 2008, standard and research organizations such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the US are still working towards a widely-recognized standard to evaluate and cross-reference their performances. In this work, a multi-harmonic generation artifact for LSNA verification is developed. It is an active device that can generate the first 5 harmonics of an input signal with ultra-stable amplitude and phase response regardless of the load impedance variation

1-D broadside-radiating leaky-wave antenna based on a numerically synthesized impedance surface

A newly-developed deterministic numerical technique for the automated design of metasurface antennas is applied here for the first time to the design of a 1-D printed Leaky-Wave Antenna (LWA) for broadside radiation. The surface impedance synthesis process does not require any a priori knowledge on the impedance pattern, and starts from a mask constraint on the desired far-field and practical bounds on the unit cell impedance values. The designed reactance surface for broadside radiation exhibits a non conventional patterning; this highlights the merit of using an automated design process for a design well known to be challenging for analytical methods. The antenna is physically implemented with an array of metal strips with varying gap widths and simulation results show very good agreement with the predicted performance

Beam scanning by liquid-crystal biasing in a modified SIW structure

A fixed-frequency beam-scanning 1D antenna based on Liquid Crystals (LCs) is designed for application in 2D scanning with lateral alignment. The 2D array environment imposes full decoupling of adjacent 1D antennas, which often conflicts with the LC requirement of DC biasing: the proposed design accommodates both. The LC medium is placed inside a Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) modified to work as a Groove Gap Waveguide, with radiating slots etched on the upper broad wall, that radiates as a Leaky-Wave Antenna (LWA). This allows effective application of the DC bias voltage needed for tuning the LCs. At the same time, the RF field remains laterally confined, enabling the possibility to lay several antennas in parallel and achieve 2D beam scanning. The design is validated by simulation employing the actual properties of a commercial LC medium

A new signal injection method with PSO for multi-carrier predistortion

In multi-carrier transmitters, nonlinear characteristic of power amplifiers (PAs) results in intra-band distortion and inter-band distortion. The intra-band distortion exists in most single-carrier transmitters as well, and can be removed by traditional digital predistortion (DPD) techniques. However, the inter-band distortion is rather unique for the multi-carrier linearization. A channel-selective multi-cell DPD architecture which deals with the intra-band and inter-band distortion separately is used in this paper. Furthermore, a new signal injection method with particle swarm optimization (PSO) is proposed to suppress the inter-band distortion in the paper. The injected inter-band signals are firstly reconstructed by a memory polynomial DPD, and then their amplitude and phase are fine-tuned by a PSO algorithm. Simulation results show that the method restrains inter-band distortion significantly and accelerates the convergence speed of PSO algorithm