UCLA

Digitally enhanced wireless transceivers are gaining prominence due to their promise of greater integration, flexibility to adapt to varying SNR conditions, performance, and area benefit that comes with CMOS feature size reduction. This thesis discusses the benefits of going digital in a system that has until now been dominated by analog or discrete-time signal processing. Digitally assisted radio transceiver architectures that incorporate a wide range of tuning parameters to control the RF carrier, signal bandwidth, and baseband modulation schemes are presented. These architectures rely on high-speed A/D and D/A conversion close to the antenna in order to maximize the extent of digital signal processing in the radio chain. We examine specific challenges that such a system faces in the context of minimizing noise, maximizing signal bandwidths, and enabling efficient filtering and sample rate conversion. The thesis also presents prototype architectures for a radio receiver and transmitter that employ a range of signal processing techniques to enable high-throughput, power-efficient systems.