Polyphase filter with parametric tuning

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

Integrated realizations of reconfigurable low pass and band pass filters for wide band multi-mode receivers

With the explosive development of wireless communication systems the specifications of the supporting hardware platforms have become more and more demanding. According to the long term goals of the industry, future communications systems should integrate a wide variety of standards. This leads to the idea of software defined radio, implemented on fully reconfigurable hardware.Among other reconfigurable hardware blocks, suitable for the software radio concept, an outstanding importance belongs to the reconfigurable filters that are responsible for the selectivity of the system. The problematic of filtering is strictly connected to the architecture chosen for a multi-mode receiver realization. According to the chosen architecture, the filters can exhibit low pass or band pass frequency responses.The idea of reconfigurable frequency parameters has been introduced since the beginning of modern filtering applications due to the required precision of the frequency response. However, the reconfiguration of the parameters was usually done in a limited range around ideal values. The purpose of the presented research is to transform the classical filter structures with simple self-correction into fully reconfigurable filters over a wide range of frequencies. The ideal variation of the frequency parameters is continuous and consequently difficult to implement in real circuits. Therefore, it is usually sufficient to use a discrete programming template with reasonably small steps.There are several methods to implement variable frequency parameters. The most often used programming templates employ resistor and capacitor arrays, switched according to a given code. The low pass filter implementation proposed in this work uses a special switching template, optimized for a quasi-linear frequency variation over logarithmic axes. The template also includes the possibility to compensate errors caused by component tolerances and temperature. Another important topic concerns the implementation of programmable band pass filters, suitable for IF sampling receivers. The discussion is centered on the feasibility and the flexibility of different band pass filter architectures. Due to the high frequency requirements, the emphasis lays on filters that employ transconductance amplifiers and capacitors.Die rasch fortschreitende Entwicklung drahtloser Kommunikationssysteme führt zu immer anspruchsvolleren Spezifikationen der diese Systeme unterstützenden Hardwareplattformen. Zukünftige Kommunikationssysteme sollen übereinstimmend mit den längerfristigen Zielen der Industrie verschiedene Standards integrieren. Dies führt zu der Idee von vollständig rekonfigurierbarer Hardware, welche mittels Software gesteuert wird.Inmitten anderer rekonfigurierbarer Hardwareblöcke, die für das Software Radio Konzept geeignet sind, besitzen die steuerbaren Filter, welche wesentlichen Einfluss auf die Selektivität des Systems haben, eine enorme Bedeutung. Die Filterproblematik ist eng mit der gewählten Architektur der standardübergreifenden Empfängerrealisierung verknüpft. Die Filter können entsprechend der ausgesuchten Architektur Tiefpass- oder Bandpasscharakter annehmen.Die Idee rekonfigurierbarer Frequenzparameter wurde bereits mit Beginn moderner Filteranwendungen auf Grund geforderter Frequenzganggenauigkeit umgesetzt. Jedoch wurde die Parameterrekonfiguration üblicherweise nur in einem begrenzten Bereich um die Idealwerte herum vorgenommen. Das Ziel der vorgestellten Forschungsarbeit ist es, diese klassischen Filterstrukturen mit einfacher Selbstkorrektur in über große Frequenzbereiche voll rekonfigurierbare Filter zu transformieren. Idealerweise werden die Frequenzparameter kontinuierlich variiert weswegen sich die Implementierung in reellen Schaltkreisen als schwierig erweist. Deshalb ist es üblicherweise ausreichend, ein diskretes Steuerschema mit kleinen Schrittweiten zu verwenden.Es gibt verschiedene Methoden, variable Frequenzparameter zu implementieren. Die meisten Schemata verwenden Widerstands- und Kondensatorfelder, die entsprechend eines Kodes geschaltet werden. Die in dieser Arbeit vorgestellte Implementierung eines Tiefpassfilters nutzt ein spezielles Umschaltschema, welches für die quasi-lineare Frequenzvariation bei Darstellung über logarithmischen Axen optimiert wurde. Es beinhaltet weiterhin die Möglichkeit, Fehler zu kompensieren, die durch Bauelementtoleranzen und Temperaturschwankungen hervorgerufen werden.Ein weiteres interessantes Thema betrifft die Implementierung steuerbarer Bandpassfilter, die für Empfänger mit Zwischenfrequenzabtastung geeignet sind. Die Betrachtung beschränkt sich hierbei auf die Durchführbarkeit und Flexibilität verschiedener Bandpassfilterarchitekturen. Auf Grund hoher Frequenzanforderungen liegt der Schwerpunkt auf Filtern, die auf Transkonduktanzverstärkern und Kondensatoren basieren

Monolithic active resonator filters for high frequencies

This doctoral thesis deals with monolithic active resonators and their use in high-frequency filters. The emphasis has been put on noise and distortion properties of active resonators, as these are crucial in potential applications. Two active resonator types are considered: passive LC resonators with active negative resistance compensation, and gyrator-based active inductor resonators. An introduction to the theory of passive resonators is given, and the basic quality factor and noise characteristics are discussed in detail. Filter structures based on parallel resonators are studied and techniques for frequency tuning briefly introduced. Based on a three-port equivalent, different negative resistor structures suitable for integration are categorized, and their fundamental small-signal and tuning properties derived. The noise properties of the topologies are analyzed and compared. The Volterra-series method is applied in the distortion estimations for each negative resistor type. Practical examples of integrated negative resistor are given with realistic measured data. High-Q active inductors based on integrated high-frequency gyrators are analyzed using the total loop phase shift as an essential parameter. Theoretical limitations of high-frequency performance and tuning are found. Noise and distortion properties are assessed in the same manner as with negative resistors to give grounds for direct comparisons. Practical issues of monolithic active inductor resonators are tackled and realized topologies with measured results are presented. Active resonator filters employing either of the resonator types are discussed. Their noise and distortion performance derived from the respective resonator results is calculated. Automated tuning techniques are briefly discussed. Exemplary designs are presented with measured data. The two realized active resonator filters with negative resistance resonators operate in the 3 – 4 GHz region with 1.1% and 12% relative bandwidths, 400-MHz tuning ranges, and 19-dB and 11-dB noise figures respectively. The DC power consumption is a low 15 mW per resonator. The active inductor filter has a center frequency of 2.4 GHz with almost 1-GHz tuning range. The noise figure is a high 30 dB as estimated by the theory. System considerations show that active filters cannot directly replace passive filters in traditional radio architectures due to their relatively poor performance, but as a new potential application, an LO signal generation system for direct-conversion transmitters with a monolithic band-pass filter is presented. Both GaAs and Si-BiCMOS realizations show the feasibility of the concept. With the comparable quality factors of 415 and 300 and approximately the same –1-dB output compression points of –20 dBm, the BiCMOS topology consumes only a fraction of DC power but still gives more than 80 dBc mirror rejection thanks to its dual-mixer topology.reviewe

Channelization for Multi-Standard Software-Defined Radio Base Stations

As the number of radio standards increase and spectrum resources come under more pressure, it becomes ever less efficient to reserve bands of spectrum for exclusive use by a single radio standard. Therefore, this work focuses on channelization structures compatible with spectrum sharing among multiple wireless standards and dynamic spectrum allocation in particular. A channelizer extracts independent communication channels from a wideband signal, and is one of the most computationally expensive components in a communications receiver. This work specifically focuses on non-uniform channelizers suitable for multi-standard Software-Defined Radio (SDR) base stations in general and public mobile radio base stations in particular. A comprehensive evaluation of non-uniform channelizers (existing and developed during the course of this work) shows that parallel and recombined variants of the Generalised Discrete Fourier Transform Modulated Filter Bank (GDFT-FB) represent the best trade-off between computational load and flexibility for dynamic spectrum allocation. Nevertheless, for base station applications (with many channels) very high filter orders may be required, making the channelizers difficult to physically implement. To mitigate this problem, multi-stage filtering techniques are applied to the GDFT-FB. It is shown that these multi-stage designs can significantly reduce the filter orders and number of operations required by the GDFT-FB. An alternative approach, applying frequency response masking techniques to the GDFT-FB prototype filter design, leads to even bigger reductions in the number of coefficients, but computational load is only reduced for oversampled configurations and then not as much as for the multi-stage designs. Both techniques render the implementation of GDFT-FB based non-uniform channelizers more practical. Finally, channelization solutions for some real-world spectrum sharing use cases are developed before some final physical implementation issues are considered

Multirate digital filters, filter banks, polyphase networks, and applications: a tutorial

Multirate digital filters and filter banks find application in communications, speech processing, image compression, antenna systems, analog voice privacy systems, and in the digital audio industry. During the last several years there has been substantial progress in multirate system research. This includes design of decimation and interpolation filters, analysis/synthesis filter banks (also called quadrature mirror filters, or QMFJ, and the development of new sampling theorems. First, the basic concepts and building blocks in multirate digital signal processing (DSPJ, including the digital polyphase representation, are reviewed. Next, recent progress as reported by several authors in this area is discussed. Several applications are described, including the following: subband coding of waveforms, voice privacy systems, integral and fractional sampling rate conversion (such as in digital audio), digital crossover networks, and multirate coding of narrow-band filter coefficients. The M-band QMF bank is discussed in considerable detail, including an analysis of various errors and imperfections. Recent techniques for perfect signal reconstruction in such systems are reviewed. The connection between QMF banks and other related topics, such as block digital filtering and periodically time-varying systems, based on a pseudo-circulant matrix framework, is covered. Unconventional applications of the polyphase concept are discussed

Design and implementation of generalized topologies of time-interleaved variable bandpass Σ−Δ modulators

In this thesis, novel analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog generalized time-interleaved variable bandpass sigma-delta modulators are designed, analysed, evaluated and implemented that are suitable for high performance data conversion for a broad-spectrum of applications. These generalized time-interleaved variable bandpass sigma-delta modulators can perform noise-shaping for any centre frequency from DC to Nyquist. The proposed topologies are well-suited for Butterworth, Chebyshev, inverse-Chebyshev and elliptical filters, where designers have the flexibility of specifying the centre frequency, bandwidth as well as the passband and stopband attenuation parameters. The application of the time-interleaving approach, in combination with these bandpass loop-filters, not only overcomes the limitations that are associated with conventional and mid-band resonator-based bandpass sigma-delta modulators, but also offers an elegant means to increase the conversion bandwidth, thereby relaxing the need to use faster or higher-order sigma-delta modulators. A step-by-step design technique has been developed for the design of time-interleaved variable bandpass sigma-delta modulators. Using this technique, an assortment of lower- and higher-order single- and multi-path generalized A/D variable bandpass sigma-delta modulators were designed, evaluated and compared in terms of their signal-to-noise ratios, hardware complexity, stability, tonality and sensitivity for ideal and non-ideal topologies. Extensive behavioural-level simulations verified that one of the proposed topologies not only used fewer coefficients but also exhibited greater robustness to non-idealties. Furthermore, second-, fourth- and sixth-order single- and multi-path digital variable bandpass digital sigma-delta modulators are designed using this technique. The mathematical modelling and evaluation of tones caused by the finite wordlengths of these digital multi-path sigmadelta modulators, when excited by sinusoidal input signals, are also derived from first principles and verified using simulation and experimental results. The fourth-order digital variable-band sigma-delta modulator topologies are implemented in VHDL and synthesized on Xilinx® SpartanTM-3 Development Kit using fixed-point arithmetic. Circuit outputs were taken via RS232 connection provided on the FPGA board and evaluated using MATLAB routines developed by the author. These routines included the decimation process as well. The experiments undertaken by the author further validated the design methodology presented in the work. In addition, a novel tunable and reconfigurable second-order variable bandpass sigma-delta modulator has been designed and evaluated at the behavioural-level. This topology offers a flexible set of choices for designers and can operate either in single- or dual-mode enabling multi-band implementations on a single digital variable bandpass sigma-delta modulator. This work is also supported by a novel user-friendly design and evaluation tool that has been developed in MATLAB/Simulink that can speed-up the design, evaluation and comparison of analog and digital single-stage and time-interleaved variable bandpass sigma-delta modulators. This tool enables the user to specify the conversion type, topology, loop-filter type, path number and oversampling ratio

Recursive receiver down-converters with multiband feedback and gain-reuse for low-power applications

Power minimization in wireless transceivers has become increasingly critical in recent years with the emergence of standards for short-distance applications in the 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) radio bands. The demand for long battery life and better portability in such applications has led to extensive research on low power radio architectures. This dissertation introduces receiver topologies for low-power systems and presents a theoretical performance analysis of the topologies. Two fully integrated receiver down-converters that demonstrate the concept are implemented in a 0.13-[mu]m CMOS technology. These topologies employ merged mixers and IF amplifiers in order to reduce power dissipation for a given dynamic range performance. In the described topologies, the input stage of a mixer is used to simultaneously provide conversion gain and baseband amplification. This is achieved by applying the down-converted IF signal to input of the mixer. Consequently, the effective conversion gain of the design is greatly enhanced with current requirement primarily determined by the input transconductor. Potential degradation mechanisms related to instability and second-order distortion are identified and solved by the use of appropriate circuit techniques. Noise and linearity performance of the down-converters is analyzed and compared to that of conventional cascaded design counterparts. The potential for enhancement of IIP3 performance through cancellation of nonlinear products is discussed. Potential extensions of the above work including feedback-based architectures that exploit multiple loops for further maximizing the power efficiency of receiver front-ends are also presented.Electrical and Computer Engineerin