Abstract

Subsampling can be used in a radio receiver to perform signal downconversion and sample-and-hold operations in order to relieve the operation frequency and bandwidth requirements of the subsequent discrete-time circuitry. However, due to the inherent aliasing behaviour of wideband noise and interference in subsampling, and the difficulty of implementing appropriate bandpass anti-aliasing filtering at high frequencies, straightforward use of a low subsampling rate can result in significant degradation of the receiver dynamic range. The aim of this thesis is to investigate and implement methods for integrating filtering into high-frequency signal sampling and downconversion by subsampling to alleviate the requirements for additional front-end filters and to mitigate the effects of noise and out-of-band signal aliasing, thereby facilitating use in integrated high-quality radio receivers.

The charge-domain sampling technique studied here allows simple integration of both continuous-and discrete-time filtering functions into high-frequency signal sampling. Gated current integration results in a lowpass sin(x)/x(sinc(x)) response capable of performing built-in anti-aliasing filtering in baseband signal sampling. Weighted integration of several successive current samples can be further used to obtain an embedded discrete-time finite-impulse-response (FIR) filtering response, which can be used for internal anti-aliasing and image-rejection filtering in the downconversion of bandpass signals by subsampling. The detailed analysis of elementary charge-domain sampling circuits presented here shows that the use of integrated FIR filtering with subsampling allows acceptable noise figures to be achieved and can provide effective internal anti-aliasing rejection.

The new methods for increasing the selectivity of elementary charge-domain sampling circuits presented here enable the integration of advanced, digitally programmable FIR filtering functions into high-frequency signal sampling, thereby markedly relieving the requirements for additional anti-aliasing, image rejection and possibly even channel selection filters in a radio receiver.

BiCMOS and CMOS IF sampler implementations are presented in order to demonstrate the feasibility of the charge-domain sampling technique for integrated anti-aliasing and image-rejection filtering in IF signal quadrature downconversion by subsampling. Circuit measurements show that this sampling technique for built-in filtering results in an accurate frequency response and allows the use of high subsampling ratios while still achieving a competitive dynamic range.