Periodic Reporting for period 3 - High-Risk-No-Gain (A new approach to design wireless receivers)
Período documentado: 2022-09-01 hasta 2024-02-29
The project aims to solve the problem of wireless communication hardware (radios) which become too complex and expensive in order to allow future high speed communications.
wireless communications is extremely important for society as we all realy on it. During the past decades the speed and quality of wireless communication has improved a lot, however extrapolating the current technology to the future will result in very expensive and complex radio. This project aims at a radically different approach.
The objective is to design a radio, which does not use any "gain", i.e. active amplification of weak antenna signals. Normally this is required to process the weak signals into larger ones, so they can be easily converted to digital. However in that case also strong interferers are amplified, resulting in a deterioration of the received signal. By refraining from using gain, the latter effect will not happen and cost can be saved on filters etc. however the analog to digital conversion needs to be completely reconsidered.
This project is ao a high-risk nature, but if we succeed the benefits will be immense: cheaper and smaller radios, and more things connected to the internet without waste of energy.
wireless communications is extremely important for society as we all realy on it. During the past decades the speed and quality of wireless communication has improved a lot, however extrapolating the current technology to the future will result in very expensive and complex radio. This project aims at a radically different approach.
The objective is to design a radio, which does not use any "gain", i.e. active amplification of weak antenna signals. Normally this is required to process the weak signals into larger ones, so they can be easily converted to digital. However in that case also strong interferers are amplified, resulting in a deterioration of the received signal. By refraining from using gain, the latter effect will not happen and cost can be saved on filters etc. however the analog to digital conversion needs to be completely reconsidered.
This project is ao a high-risk nature, but if we succeed the benefits will be immense: cheaper and smaller radios, and more things connected to the internet without waste of energy.
6 out of the 6 Ph.D. students have been recruited. They all started during the first half of the calendar year 2020.
After a literature study and several design iterations, we have now defined a clear path forward. The basic idea of "no gain" keeps standing and looks promising. However, distortion problems in switches appear harder than expected.
Currently ( February 2022) we are in the process of designing the first generation of test chips for the first evaluation phase of our ideas. Teschips include: 1) an N-path filter antenna interface, with extreme selectivity; 2) an
ultra-low-noise ADC ; 3) a digital reflector to reflect unwanted signals arriving at the antenna; 4) precise timing circuits with far-beyond state-of-the-art timing accuracy to clock the N-path filter.
We have no publications yet, as we first prefer to have the experimental results of the chips. These are expected in the second half of 2022
After a literature study and several design iterations, we have now defined a clear path forward. The basic idea of "no gain" keeps standing and looks promising. However, distortion problems in switches appear harder than expected.
Currently ( February 2022) we are in the process of designing the first generation of test chips for the first evaluation phase of our ideas. Teschips include: 1) an N-path filter antenna interface, with extreme selectivity; 2) an
ultra-low-noise ADC ; 3) a digital reflector to reflect unwanted signals arriving at the antenna; 4) precise timing circuits with far-beyond state-of-the-art timing accuracy to clock the N-path filter.
We have no publications yet, as we first prefer to have the experimental results of the chips. These are expected in the second half of 2022
We hope to achieve a novel IC design strategy for analog and RF front ends that do not need active linear gain. This will lead to more robustness against interferers, as well as suitability for sub-1 nanometer IC technologies, without requiring classical analog transistor properties.