A Scalable 6-to-18 GHz Concurrent Dual-Band Quad-Beam Phased-Array Receiver in CMOS

This paper reports a 6-to-18 GHz integrated phased- array receiver implemented in 130-nm CMOS. The receiver is easily scalable to build a very large-scale phased-array system. It concurrently forms four independent beams at two different frequencies from 6 to 18 GHz. The nominal conversion gain of the receiver ranges from 16 to 24 dB over the entire band while the worst-case cross-band and cross-polarization rejections are achieved 48 dB and 63 dB, respectively. Phase shifting is performed in the LO path by a digital phase rotator with the worst-case RMS phase error and amplitude variation of 0.5° and 0.4 dB, respectively, over the entire band. A four-element phased-array receiver system is implemented based on four receiver chips. The measured array patterns agree well with the theoretical ones with a peak-to-null ratio of over 21.5 dB

Calibrating CHIME, A New Radio Interferometer to Probe Dark Energy

The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is a transit interferometer currently being built at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) in Penticton, BC, Canada. We will use CHIME to map neutral hydrogen in the frequency range 400 -- 800\,MHz over half of the sky, producing a measurement of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) at redshifts between 0.8 -- 2.5 to probe dark energy. We have deployed a pathfinder version of CHIME that will yield constraints on the BAO power spectrum and provide a test-bed for our calibration scheme. I will discuss the CHIME calibration requirements and describe instrumentation we are developing to meet these requirements

Simulation of Multi-element Antenna Systems for Navigation Applications

The application of user terminals with multiple antenna inputs for use with the global satellite navigation systems like GPS and Galileo becomes more and more attraction in last years. Multiple antennas may be spread over the user platform and provide signals required for the platform attitude estimation or may be arranged in an antenna array to be used together with array processing algorithms for improving signal reception, e.g. for multipath and interference mitigation. In order to generate signals for testing of receivers with multiple antenna inputs and corresponding receiver algorithms in a laboratory environment a unique HW signal simulation tool for wavefront simulation has been developed. The signals for a number of antenna elements in a flexible user defined geometry are first generated as digital signals in baseband and then mixed up to individual RF-outputs. The paper describes the principle function of the system and addresses some calibration issues. Measurement set-ups and results of data processing with simulated signals for different applications are shown and discussed

The Murchison Widefield Array: the Square Kilometre Array Precursor at low radio frequencies

The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is one of three Square Kilometre Array Precursor telescopes and is located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in the Murchison Shire of the mid-west of Western Australia, a location chosen for its extremely low levels of radio frequency interference. The MWA operates at low radio frequencies, 80-300 MHz, with a processed bandwidth of 30.72 MHz for both linear polarisations, and consists of 128 aperture arrays (known as tiles) distributed over a ~3 km diameter area. Novel hybrid hardware/software correlation and a real-time imaging and calibration systems comprise the MWA signal processing backend. In this paper the as-built MWA is described both at a system and sub-system level, the expected performance of the array is presented, and the science goals of the instrument are summarised.Comment: Submitted to PASA. 11 figures, 2 table

Mapping our Universe in 3D with MITEoR

Mapping our universe in 3D by imaging the redshifted 21 cm line from neutral hydrogen has the potential to overtake the cosmic microwave background as our most powerful cosmological probe, because it can map a much larger volume of our Universe, shedding new light on the epoch of reionization, inflation, dark matter, dark energy, and neutrino masses. We report on MITEoR, a pathfinder low-frequency radio interferometer whose goal is to test technologies that greatly reduce the cost of such 3D mapping for a given sensitivity. MITEoR accomplishes this by using massive baseline redundancy both to enable automated precision calibration and to cut the correlator cost scaling from N^2 to NlogN, where N is the number of antennas. The success of MITEoR with its 64 dual-polarization elements bodes well for the more ambitious HERA project, which would incorporate many identical or similar technologies using an order of magnitude more antennas, each with dramatically larger collecting area.Comment: To be published in proceedings of 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Phased Array Systems & Technolog

A Fully-Integrated Reconfigurable Dual-Band Transceiver for Short Range Wireless Communications in 180 nm CMOS

© 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.A fully-integrated reconfigurable dual-band (760-960 MHz and 2.4-2.5 GHz) transceiver (TRX) for short range wireless communications is presented. The TRX consists of two individually-optimized RF front-ends for each band and one shared power-scalable analog baseband. The sub-GHz receiver has achieved the maximum 75 dBc 3rd-order harmonic rejection ratio (HRR3) by inserting a Q-enhanced notch filtering RF amplifier (RFA). In 2.4 GHz band, a single-ended-to-differential RFA with gain/phase imbalance compensation is proposed in the receiver. A ΣΔ fractional-N PLL frequency synthesizer with two switchable Class-C VCOs is employed to provide the LOs. Moreover, the integrated multi-mode PAs achieve the output P1dB (OP1dB) of 16.3 dBm and 14.1 dBm with both 25% PAE for sub-GHz and 2.4 GHz bands, respectively. A power-control loop is proposed to detect the input signal PAPR in real-time and flexibly reconfigure the PA's operation modes to enhance the back-off efficiency. With this proposed technique, the PAE of the sub-GHz PA is improved by x3.24 and x1.41 at 9 dB and 3 dB back-off powers, respectively, and the PAE of the 2.4 GHz PA is improved by x2.17 at 6 dB back-off power. The presented transceiver has achieved comparable or even better performance in terms of noise figure, HRR, OP1dB and power efficiency compared with the state-of-the-art.Peer reviewe

Spatial channel characterization for smart antenna solutions in FDD wireless networks

This paper introduces a novel metric for determining the spatial decorrelation between the up- and down-link wireless bearers in frequency division duplex (FDD) networks. This metric has direct relevance to smart or adaptive antenna array base-station deployments in cellular networks, which are known to offer capacity enhancement when compared to fixed coverage solutions. In particular, the results presented were obtained from field trial measurement campaigns for both urban and rural scenarios, with the observations having a direct impact on the choice of down-link beamforming architecture in FDD applications. Further, it is shown that significant spatial decorrelation can occur in urban deployments for bearer separations as small as 5 MHz. Results are presented in terms of both instantaneous characteristics as well as time averaged estimates, thus facilitating the appraisal of smart antenna solutions in both packet and circuit switched network

GPS Multipath Reduction with Correlator Beamforming

This research effort investigates the feasibility of beamforming using a single Global Positioning System (GPS) front end. Traditional methods of beamforming use multiple front ends, typically one per antenna element. By enabling a receiver to sample a switched antenna array, the hardware cost of implementing a GPS antenna array can be significantly reduced. Similar techniques of reducing the number of receivers have been used by Locata Corporation in the design of their non-GPS positioning systems. However, Locata Corporation\u27s local transmitters provide a signal strength much higher than GPS\u27s signal strength. For this reason, the inclusion of low-noise amplifiers into the GPS based system was investigated. GPS data was collected using a multiple channel antenna array. Simulated switching was then performed to combine the four channels of data in to a single channel of switched data. Next, a GPS receiver using correlator beamforming was developed to apply the necessary phase shift to each data sample and form an antenna beam in the direction of the desired satellite. The switched data was processed and analyzed with the receiver. The results successfully demonstrated the potential for correlator beamforming to be used with GPS signals. Additional experiments were performed with simulated GPS data to further characterize the capability of the receiver