Front-end analog electronic circuits

Analogue filter considerations are critical to the success of the hardware component of a Software Defined Radio. This paper sets out to show that the filtering requirements of a receiver and transmitter are very similar, and goes on to show that linearity issues are also of similar concern with both the transmitter and receiver. The paper then focuses on the image rejection requirements of an SDR receiver, and discusses filter techniques that can provide flexible image suppression.

This paper describes a discretely tunable filter topology based on lumped-distributed coupled transmission lines, particularly suitable for microelectromechanical systems switching devices. This topology is capable of simultaneous wide-band center frequency and bandwidth tuning, limited only by the electrical size of the transmission lines and the placement density of the switching devices. Low fractional bandwidths can be achieved without the need for large coupled-line spacings due to the antiphase relationship of the lumped capacitive and distributed electromagnetic coupling coefficients. The positions of the additional poles of attenuation due to the lumped capacitive coupling can be selected either above or below band leading to the choice of a narrow bandwidth design having good high-side performance or a design with compromised upper stopband performance, but with no bandwidth tuning limitations. The interaction between a pair of lumped-distributed coupled transmission lines is analyzed and the resulting model is used to develop a filter synthesis procedure. The synthesis procedure and filter performance are validated through theoretical and experimental comparisons using a filter with low-side attenuation poles.

Amplifiers are widely used in signal receiving circuits, such as antennas, medical imaging, wireless devices and many other applications. However, one of the most challenging problems when building an amplifier circuit is the noise, since it affects the quality of the intended received signal in most wireless applications. Therefore, a preamplifier is usually placed close to the main sensor to reduce the effects of interferences and to amplify the received signal without degrading the signal-to-noise ratio. Although different designs have been optimized and tested in the literature, all of them are using larger than 100 nm technologies which have led to a modest performance in terms of equivalent noise charge (ENC), gain, power consumption, and response time. In contrast, we consider in this paper a new amplifier design technology trend and move towards sub 100 nm to enhance its performance. In this work, we use a pre-well-known design of a preamplifier circuit and rebuild it using 45 nm CMOS technology, which is made for the first time in such circuits. Performance evaluation shows that our proposed scaling technology, compared with other scaling technology, extremely reduces ENC of the circuit by more than 95%. The noise spectral density and time resolution are also reduced by 25% and 95% respectively. In addition, power consumption is decreased due to the reduced channel length by 90%. As a result, all of those enhancements make our proposed circuit more suitable for medical and wireless devices. This is an open access article under the CC BY-SA license.

This paper describes a discretely tunable filter topology based on lumped-distributed coupled transmission lines, particularly suitable for microelectromechanical systems switching devices. This topology is capable of simultaneous wide-band center frequency and bandwidth tuning, limited only by the electrical size of the transmission lines and the placement density of the switching devices. Low fractional bandwidths can be achieved without the need for large coupled-line spacings due to the antiphase relationship of the lumped capacitive and distributed electromagnetic coupling coefficients. The positions of the additional poles of attenuation due to the lumped capacitive coupling can be selected either above or below band leading to the choice of a narrow bandwidth design having good high-side performance or a design with compromised upper stopband performance, but with no bandwidth tuning limitations. The interaction between a pair of lumped-distributed coupled transmission lines is analyzed and the resulting model is used to develop a filter synthesis procedure. The synthesis procedure and filter performance are validated through theoretical and experimental comparisons using a filter with low-side attenuation poles.

Broadband amplifiers that can accommodate commercial communication standards such as GSM, UMTS, Wi-Fi, and Wi-Max are extremely important for radio equipment manufacturers. To achieve this coverage, the amplifier should provide high gain and efficiency over a band from 800 to 5200 MHz. Although there are transistor devices that have cut-off frequencies well over these frequencies, amplifiers covering such a broad-bandwidth are difficult to design due to the requirement of broadband matching networks. In this work, design of broadband tunable matching networks is investigated using Real Frequency Direct Computational Technique (RF-DCT). In order to be able to work on sample structures, impedance transforming filters are chosen and a broadband tunable matching network has been designed. Implementation of tunable inductors is investigated and the performance of a tunable matching network using tunable inductors and capacitors is demonstrated. Eventually a broadband frequency tunable amplifier has been designed using the tunable inductor concept. V C 2013