Abstract EN:

The continuous improvement of both speed and density of digital circuits in CMOS technologies makes it attractive to push most of the chip functionality from the RF and analog domain to the digital domain. In an RF receiver, this means to push the Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) near the antenna to achieve what is commonly known as Software Defined Radio (SDR). In SDR receivers, most of the analog blocks such as the down-conversion mixer and the channel selection filter are moved to the digital domain. In this case, most of the signal processing is done in the flexible and programmable digital domain. One of the main challenges in implementing an SDR receiver is the stringent ADC requirements. The ADC must have a large bandwidth and a high dynamic range to be able to deal with the targeted RF band in the presence of strong out-of-band blockers. A promising technique to achieve these ADC specifications is to use a bandpass LC Sigma-Delta ADC with an RF center frequency.