Design of Rf/if Analog to Digital Converters for Software Radio Communication Receivers

Design of RF/IF Analog to Digital Converters for Software Radio Communication Receivers. (May 2006) Bharath Kumar Thandri, B.E. (Hons.), Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India; M.S., Texas A&M University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Jose Silva-Martinez Software radio architecture can support multiple standards by performing analogto-digital (A/D) conversion of the radio frequency (RF) signals and running reconfigurable software programs on the backend digital signal processor (DSP). A slight variation of this architecture is the software defined radio architecture in which the A/D conversion is performed on intermediate frequency (IF) signals after a single down conversion. The first part of this research deals with the design and implementation of a fourth order continuous time bandpass sigma-delta (CT BP Σ∆) ADC based on LC filters for direct RF digitization at 950 MHz with a clock frequency of 3.8 GHz. A new ADC architecture is proposed which uses only non-return to zero feedback digital to analog converter pulses to mitigate problems associated with clock jitter. The architecture also has full control over tuning of the coefficients of the noise transfer function for obtaining