Technical Papers
Digitally-Assisted Analog: Reducing Design Constraints by Using Nonlinear Signal Processing
Presented by Roy Batruni, Software Defined Radio Forum, November 2005
Abstract
While Moores Law has been predictive of continuous gains in digital circuit scaling, the relative performance of analog circuits has not scaled along with digital. Due to characteristics of analog circuitry, noise and distortion performance do not benefit from scaling, and some inherent challenges intensify with reduced supply voltage. Analog functions are often system roadblocks, resulting in constrained performance, especially in high-performance signal processing applications. However, as digital circuitry has scaled down, it has become practical to use digital processing in conjunction with analog functions to offload some of the bottlenecks, and the digitally assisted analog trend is well identified. This paper presents an example of the high leverage of this approach in overcoming a previously unsolvable problem: eliminating nonlinear distortion in a high-speed analog signal path using digital post-processing techniques…
Contributed Articles
Curing Nonlinear Distortion
Embedded Systems Design
August 2006
Long wires or distant wireless communications always garble the transmission. How can an engineer cure that distortion? Turns out, a lot of math and a little experience can work wonders. This author provides both, giving us priceless recipes for cleaning up long-range communications.
