A low-power quadrature digital modulator in 0.18um CMOS

Quadrature digital modulation techniques are widely used in modern communication systems because of their high performance and flexibility. However, these advantages come at the cost of high power consumption. As a result, power consumption has to be taken into account as a main design factor of the modulator.In this thesis, a low-power quadrature digital modulator in 0.18um CMOS is presented with the target system clock speed of 150 MHz. The quadrature digital modulator consists of several key blocks: quadrature direct digital synthesizer (QDDS), pulse shaping filter, interpolation filter and inverse sinc filter. The design strategy is to investigate different implementations for each block and compare the power consumption of these implementations. Based on the comparison results, the implementation that consumes the lowest power will be chosen for each block. First of all, a novel low-power QDDS is proposed in the thesis. Power consumption estimation shows that it can save up to 60% of the power consumption at 150 MHz system clock frequency compared with one conventional design. Power consumption estimation results also show that using two pulse shaping blocks to process I/Q data, cascaded integrator comb (CIC) interpolation structure, and inverse sinc filter with modified canonic signed digit (MCSD) multiplication consume less power than alternative design choices. These low-power blocks are integrated together to achieve a low-power modulator. The power consumption estimation after layout shows that it only consumes about 95 mW at 150 MHz system clock rate, which is much lower than similar commercial products. The designed modulator can provide a low-power solution for various quadrature modulators. It also has an output bandwidth from 0 to 75 MHz, configurable pulse shaping filters and interpolation filters, and an internal sin(x)/x correction filter

Implementation of a low cost demonstrator riometer on a flexible FPGA backend: The first steps in adding a riometer mode to the digital SuperDARN radar at SANAE IV

SuperDARN is an international network of 35 HF radars located near the poles of the Earth dedicated to determining the state of the ionosphere at high latitudes. One of the SuperDARN radars is located at South Africa's base in Antarctica (SANAE IV) and is administered by the South African National Space Association (SANSA). The radar at SANAE IV was recently upgraded to a fully digital transceiver, with the addition of a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) at the core of this upgrade. FPGAs allow for easy hardware reconfiguration and high-performance computing. The aim of this project is to determine the feasibility of using the FPGA on board the radar at SANAE IV to implement a riometer mode to run simultaneously with its main mode of operation, adding a new tool to the radar's set of abilities without any investment in new hardware. The riometer function could easily be ported to other radars in the SuperDARN network, allowing for a significant increase in riometer coverage of the polar regions. As a first step towards achieving this goal, a demonstrator riometer is developed using the Red Pitaya FPGA platform as its backend, and tested at the University of Cape Town, at SANSA in Hermanus and at Fish Hoek. A riometer measures the opacity of the ionosphere with respect to cosmic radiation. Doing this over a wide band of frequencies results in a spectral riometer. This dissertation describes the design and implementation of both a single frequency and a spectral riometer, both implemented on the Red Pitaya, and the results of testing these implementations. Experimentation alongside a La Jolla 38MHz riometer revealed very similar performance for the low-cost demonstrator riometer. It is thereby shown that low cost HF riometry is possible and that it is feasible to implement a riometer on the radar at SANAE IV. However, an additional FPGA is required

The effect of coefficient quantization optimization on filtering performance and gate count

Abstract. Digital filters are an essential component of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) applications and play a crucial role in removing unwanted signal components from a desired signal. However, digital filters are known to be resource-intensive and consume a large amount of power, making it important to optimize their design in order to minimize hardware requirements such as multipliers, adders, and registers. This trade-off between filter performance and hardware consumption can be influenced by the quantization of filter coefficients. Therefore, this thesis investigates the quantization of Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter coefficients and analyzes its impact on filter performance and hardware resource consumption. A method called dynamic quantization is introduced and an algorithm for step-by-step dynamic quantization is provided to improve upon the results obtained with the classical fixed point quantization method. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, the dynamic quantization of filter coefficients for a Low-pass Equiripple FIR filter is examined and a comparative study of the magnitude response and hardware consumption of the generated filter using both the classical and dynamic quantization methods is presented. By understanding the trade-offs and benefits of each quantization method, engineers can make informed decisions about the most appropriate approach for their specific application

Signal and power integrity co-simulation using the multi-layer finite difference method

Mixed signal system-on-package (SoP) technology is a key enabler for increasing functional integration, especially in mobile and wireless systems. Due to the presence of multiple dissimilar modules, each having unique power supply requirements, the design of the power distribution network (PDN) becomes critical. Typically, this PDN is designed as alternating layers of power and ground planes with signal interconnects routed in between or on top of the planes. The goal for the simulation of multi-layer power/ground planes, is the following: Given a stack-up and other geometrical information, it is required to find the network parameters (S/Y/Z) between port locations. Commercial packages have extremely complicated stack-ups, and the trend to increasing integration at the package level only points to increasing complexity. It is computationally intractable to solve these problems using these existing methods. The approach proposed in this thesis for obtaining the response of the PDN is the multi-layer finite difference method (M-FDM). A surface mesh / finite difference based approach is developed, which leads to a system matrix that is sparse and banded, and can be solved efficiently. The contributions of this research are the following: 1. The development of a PDN modeler for multi-layer packages and boards called the the multi-layer finite difference method. 2. The enhancement of M-FDM using multi-port connection networks to include the effect of fringe fields and gap coupling. 3. An adaptive triangular mesh based scheme called the multi-layer finite element method (MFEM) to address the limitations of M-FDM 4. The use of modal decomposition for the co-simulation of signal nets with the PDN. 5. The use of a robust GA-based optimizer for the selection and placement of decoupling capacitors in multi-layer geometries. 6. Implementation of these methods in a tool called MSDT 1.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Madhavan Swaminathan; Committee Member: Andrew F. Peterson; Committee Member: David C. Keezer; Committee Member: Saibal Mukhopadyay; Committee Member: Suresh Sitarama

Fully-photonic digital radio over fibre for future super-broadband access network applications

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel UniversityIn this thesis a Fully-Photonic DRoF (FP-DRoF) system is proposed for deploying of future super-broadband access networks. Digital Radio over Fibre (DRoF) is more independent of the fibre network impairments and the length of fibre than the ARoF link. In order for fully optical deployment of the signal conversion techniques in the FP-DRoF architecture, two key components an Analogue-to-Digital Converter (ADC) and a Digital-to-Analogue Converter (DAC)) for data conversion are designed and their performance are investigated whereas the physical functionality is evaluated. The system simulation results of the proposed pipelined Photonic ADC (PADC) show that the PADC has 10 GHz bandwidth around 60 GHz of sampling rate. Furthermore, by changing the bandwidth of the optical bandpass filter, switching to another band of sampling frequency provides optimised performance condition of the PADC. The PADC has low changes on the Effective Number of Bit (ENOB) response versus analogue RF input from 1 GHz up to 22 GHz for 60 GHz sampling frequency. The proposed 8-Bit pipelined PADC performance in terms of ENOB is evaluated at 60 Gigasample/s which is about 4.1. Recently, different methods have been reported by researchers to implement Photonic DACs (PDACs), but their aim was to convert digital electrical signals to the corresponding analogue signal by assisting the optical techniques. In this thesis, a Binary Weighted PDAC (BW-PDAC) is proposed. In this BW-PDAC, optical digital signals are fully optically converted to an analogue signal. The spurious free dynamic range at the output of the PDAC in a back-to-back deployment of the PADC and the PDAC was 26.6 dBc. For further improvement in the system performance, a 3R (Retiming, Reshaping and Reamplifying) regeneration system is proposed in this thesis. Simulation results show that for an ultrashort RZ pulse with a 5% duty cycle at 65 Gbit/s using the proposed 3R regeneration system on a link reduces rms timing jitter by 90% while the regenerated pulse eye opening height is improved by 65%. Finally, in this thesis the proposed FP-DRoF functionality is evaluated whereas its performance is investigated through a dedicated and shared fibre links. The simulation results show (in the case of low level signal to noise ratio, in comparison with ARoF through a dedicated fibre link) that the FP-DRoF has better BER performance than the ARoF in the order of 10-20. Furthermore, in order to realize a BER about 10-25 for the ARoF, the power penalty is about 4 dBm higher than the FP-DRoF link. The simulation results demonstrate that by considering 0.2 dB/km attenuation of a standard single mode fibre, the dedicated fibre length for the FP-DRoF link can be increased to about 20 km more than the ARoF link. Moreover, for performance assessment of the proposed FP-DRoF in a shared fibre link, the BER of the FP-DRoF link is about 10-10 magnitude less than the ARoF link for -19 dBm launched power into the fibre and the power penalty of the ARoF system is 10 dBm more than the FP-DRoF link. It is significant to increase the fibre link’s length of the FP-DRoF access network using common infrastructure. In addition, the simulation results are demonstrated that the FP-DRoF with non-uniform Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) is more robust against four wave mixing impairment than the conventional WDM technique with uniform wavelength allocation and has better performance in terms of BER. It is clearly verified that the lunched power penalty at CS for DRoF link with uniform WDM techniques is about 2 dB higher than non-uniform WDM technique. Furthermore, uniform WDM method requires more bandwidth than non-uniform scheme which depends on the total number of channels and channels spacing

Shuttle mission simulator baseline definition report, volume 1

A baseline definition of the space shuttle mission simulator is presented. The subjects discussed are: (1) physical arrangement of the complete simulator system in the appropriate facility, with a definition of the required facility modifications, (2) functional descriptions of all hardware units, including the operational features, data demands, and facility interfaces, (3) hardware features necessary to integrate the items into a baseline simulator system to include the rationale for selecting the chosen implementation, and (4) operating, maintenance, and configuration updating characteristics of the simulator hardware

Filtering amplifiers based on coupled resonator circuits

Terahertz (THz) wireless communication systems over 300 GHz can offer broad bandwidth, but they have limitations, such as high precision fabrication requirements, high fabrication cost and lossy system components. This thesis introduces a THz communication system concept based on low-cost and high precision micromachining techniques, also a new design approach to achieve a low loss system for THz communication components and systems. In order to minimise the components and systems losses, this thesis proposes a design approach for filtering amplifiers which removes the lossy planar matching and interconnection circuits to complete the transistor amplifiers design. The technique also adds filters resulting in a combined filtering amplifier. To enable this, an analytical design method for filtering amplifiers based on the conventional passive coupling matrix for filters is expanded for the filtering amplifiers. Novel coupled resonator circuits, including a general transistor model for the first time is investigated and a new [$T$] matrix is introduced to facilitate the transistor element. Complete mathematical formulas are provided in this thesis for the coupled resonator circuits for transistor amplifiers. Two physical design examples at X band are provided in this thesis to demonstrate the usage of the novel coupling matrix with a simple mathematical synthesis. A waveguide filtering amplifier is demonstrated using waveguide resonators. This waveguide amplifier reflects the design considerations and methods for future THz amplifier developments. Good correlations between mathematical synthesis results and physical measurements are achieved for the waveguide filtering amplifier, with 3 clearly observed poles in passband, verifying the order of the filters

Applications of MATLAB in Science and Engineering

The book consists of 24 chapters illustrating a wide range of areas where MATLAB tools are applied. These areas include mathematics, physics, chemistry and chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, biological (molecular biology) and medical sciences, communication and control systems, digital signal, image and video processing, system modeling and simulation. Many interesting problems have been included throughout the book, and its contents will be beneficial for students and professionals in wide areas of interest