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

Radio-Communications Architectures

Wireless communications, i.e. radio-communications, are widely used for our different daily needs. Examples are numerous and standard names like BLUETOOTH, WiFI, WiMAX, UMTS, GSM and, more recently, LTE are well-known [Baudoin et al. 2007]. General applications in the RFID or UWB contexts are the subject of many papers. This chapter presents radio-frequency (RF) communication systems architecture for mobile, wireless local area networks (WLAN) and connectivity terminals. An important aspect of today's applications is the data rate increase, especially in connectivity standards like WiFI and WiMAX, because the user demands high Quality of Service (QoS). To increase the data rate we tend to use wideband or multi-standard architecture. The concept of software radio includes a self-reconfigurable radio link and is described here on its RF aspects. The term multi-radio is preferred. This chapter focuses on the transmitter, yet some considerations about the receiver are given. An important aspect of the architecture is that a transceiver is built with respect to the radio-communications signals. We classify them in section 2 by differentiating Continuous Wave (CW) and Impulse Radio (IR) systems. Section 3 is the technical background one has to consider for actual applications. Section 4 summarizes state-of-the-art high data rate architectures and the latest research in multi-radio systems. In section 5, IR architectures for Ultra Wide Band (UWB) systems complete this overview; we will also underline the coexistence and compatibility challenges between CW and IR systems

Review of Recent Trends

This work was partially supported by the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER), through the Regional Operational Programme of Centre (CENTRO 2020) of the Portugal 2020 framework, through projects SOCA (CENTRO-01-0145-FEDER-000010) and ORCIP (CENTRO-01-0145-FEDER-022141). Fernando P. Guiomar acknowledges a fellowship from “la Caixa” Foundation (ID100010434), code LCF/BQ/PR20/11770015. Houda Harkat acknowledges the financial support of the Programmatic Financing of the CTS R&D Unit (UIDP/00066/2020).MIMO-OFDM is a key technology and a strong candidate for 5G telecommunication systems. In the literature, there is no convenient survey study that rounds up all the necessary points to be investigated concerning such systems. The current deeper review paper inspects and interprets the state of the art and addresses several research axes related to MIMO-OFDM systems. Two topics have received special attention: MIMO waveforms and MIMO-OFDM channel estimation. The existing MIMO hardware and software innovations, in addition to the MIMO-OFDM equalization techniques, are discussed concisely. In the literature, only a few authors have discussed the MIMO channel estimation and modeling problems for a variety of MIMO systems. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has been until now no review paper specifically discussing the recent works concerning channel estimation and the equalization process for MIMO-OFDM systems. Hence, the current work focuses on analyzing the recently used algorithms in the field, which could be a rich reference for researchers. Moreover, some research perspectives are identified.publishersversionpublishe

Design of Digital Frequency Synthesizer for 5G SDR Systems

The previous frequency synthesizer techniques for scalable SDR are not compatible with high end applications due to its complex computations and the intolerance over increased path interference rate which leads to an unsatisfied performance with improved user rate in real time environment. Designing an efficient frequency synthesizer framework in the SDR system is essential for 5G wireless communication systems with improved Quality of service (QoS). Consequently, this research has been performed based on the merits of fully digitalized frequency synthesizer and its explosion in wide range of frequency band generations. In this paper hardware optimized reconfigurable digital base band processing and frequency synthesizer model is proposed without making any design complexity trade-off to deal with the multiple standards. Here fully digitalized frequency synthesizer is introduced using simplified delay units to reduce the design complexity. Experimental results and comparative analyzes are carried out to validate the performance metrics and exhaustive test bench simulation is also carried out to verify the functionality

WIRELESS ANTENNA MULTIPLEXING USING TUNABLE ANTENNA FOR SPACE APPLICATIONS

Recent development in communication technologies shifts the communication paradigm from point to point to multi-user wireless systems. These developments eased the use of mobile telephone, satellite services, 5G cellular, smart application, and the Internet of Things. The proliferation of mobile devices has necessitated an elaborate mechanism to serve multiple users over a shared communication medium, and a multiplexing approach is introduced to serve this purpose. Multiplexing refers to a method that aims at combining multiple signals into one signal such that each user would be able to extract its desired data upon receiving the multiplexed signal. This spectrum sharing allows wireless operators to maximize the use of their spectrum to accommodate a large number of users over fewer channels. In Space applications, where sensors like temperature, attitude, IR, Magnetic, etc. send information using antennas operate at a different frequency, there is a need to collect all or some of these data using a single device. A wideband antenna requires a filtering process in order to remove unwanted signals that lead to a complex circuit design. Furthermore, the use of multiple antennas ends up with a larger size and additional complexity. Therefore, the tunable antenna is an excellent candidate which provides a perfect solution for such scenarios. A tunable antenna whose frequency characteristics shifted by applying tuning action can be used to operate as a multiplexing device that can collect signals from different surrounding antennas; each operates at a fixed frequency. A system architecture for wireless multiplexing using a tunable antenna is proposed in this project. An electronically tunable antenna using varactor diode as a tuning element is used as the multiplexing device that can collect signals from different surrounding antennas. The system consists of an RF front end and a control circuit/system for wireless multiplexing. The RF front end consists of a tunable antenna, tunable phase shifter, tunable bandpass filter, low noise amplifier, mixer, voltage-controlled oscillator, and an intermediate frequency filter. The control unit comprises a microcontroller, DAC, CMOS oscillator, power module, and a USB interface for communication with custom-built software installed on a PC. The device has functions for control, digital signal processing, and de-multiplexing. The device is fed with an input multiplexed signal, and the de-multiplexed output signals are extracted and displayed on the graphical user interface of the software. Due to the reconfigurability and programmability of the device, it presents a flexible, cost-effective solution for a variety of real-world applications

Software-Defined Radio Demonstrators: An Example and Future Trends

Software-defined radio requires the combination of software-based signal processing and the enabling hardware components. In this paper, we present an overview of the criteria for such platforms and the current state of development and future trends in this area. This paper will also provide details of a high-performance flexible radio platform called the maynooth adaptable radio system (MARS) that was developed to explore the use of software-defined radio concepts in the provision of infrastructure elements in a telecommunications application, such as mobile phone basestations or multimedia broadcasters

DSP-enabled Reconfigurable Optical Network Devices and Architectures for Cloud Access Networks

To meet the ever-increasing bandwidth requirements, the rapid growth in highly dynamic traffic patterns, and the increasing complexity in network operation, whilst providing high power consumption efficiency and cost-effectiveness, the approach of combining traditional optical access networks, metropolitan area networks and 4-th generation (4G)/5-th generation (5G) mobile front-haul/back-haul networks into unified cloud access networks (CANs) is one of the most preferred “future-proof” technical strategies. The aim of this dissertation research is to extensively explore, both numerically and experimentally, the technical feasibility of utilising digital signal processing (DSP) to achieve key fundamental elements of CANs from device level to network architecture level including: i) software reconfigurable optical transceivers, ii) DSP-enabled reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs), iii) network operation characteristics-transparent digital filter multiple access (DFMA) techniques, and iv) DFMA-based passive optical network (PON) with DSP-enabled software reconfigurability. As reconfigurable optical transceivers constitute fundamental building blocks of the CAN’s physical layer, digital orthogonal filtering-based novel software reconfigurable transceivers are proposed and experimentally and numerically explored, for the first time. By making use of Hilbert-pair-based 32-tap digital orthogonal filters implemented in field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), a 2GS/s@8-bit digital-to-analogue converter (DAC)/analogue-to-digital converter (ADC), and an electro-absorption modulated laser (EML) intensity modulator (IM), world-first reconfigurable real-time transceivers are successfully experimentally demonstrated in a 25km IMDD SSMF system. The transceiver dynamically multiplexes two orthogonal frequency division multiplexed (OFDM) channels with a total capacity of 3.44Gb/s. Experimental results also indicate that the transceiver performance is fully transparent to various subcarrier modulation formats of up to 64-QAM, and that the maximum achievable transceiver performance is mainly limited by the cross-talk effect between two spectrally-overlapped orthogonal channels, which can, however, be minimised by adaptive modulation of the OFDM signals. For further transceiver optimisations, the impacts of major transceiver design parameters including digital filter tap number and subcarrier modulation format on the transmission performance are also numerically explored. II Reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs) are also vital networking devices for application in CANs as they play a critical role in offering fast and flexible network reconfiguration. A new optical-electrical-optical (O-E-O) conversion-free, software-switched flexible ROADM is extensively explored, which is capable of providing dynamic add/drop operations at wavelength, sub-wavelength and orthogonal sub-band levels in software defined networks incorporating the reconfigurable transceivers. Firstly, the basic add and drop operations of the proposed ROADMs are theoretically explored and the ROADM designs are optimised. To crucially validate the practical feasibility of the ROADMs, ROADMs are experimentally demonstrated, for the first time. Experimental results show that the add and drop operation performances are independent of the sub-band signal spectral location and add/drop power penalties are <2dB. In addition, the ROADMs are also robust against a differential optical power dynamic range of >2dB and a drop RF signal power range of 7.1dB. In addition to exploring key optical networking devices for CANs, the first ever DFMA PON experimental demonstrations are also conducted, by using two real-time, reconfigurable, OOFDM-modulated optical network units (ONUs) operating on spectrally overlapped multi-Gb/s orthogonal channels, and an offline optical line terminal (OLT). For multipoint-to-point upstream signal transmission over 26km SSMF in an IMDD DFMA PON, experiments show that each ONU achieves a similar upstream BER performance, excellent robustness to inter-ONU sample timing offset (STO) and a large ONU launch power variation range. Given the importance of IMDD DFMA-PON channel frequency response roll-off, both theoretical and experimental explorations are undertaken to investigate the impact of channel frequency response roll-off on the upstream transmission of the DFMA PON system Such work provides valuable insights into channel roll-off-induced performance dependencies to facilitate cost-effective practical network/transceiver/component designs