Portable communication systems require, in part, high-efficiency radio frequency power amplifiers (RF PA) if battery lifetime is to be conserved. Conventional amplifier classifications and definitions are presented in a unified and concise format. The Bipolar Junction Transistor (BJT) and Metal-Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor (MESFET) are evaluated as active devices in high-efficiency RF PA designs. Two amplifier classes (class CE and class F) meet the system requirements of an 850 MHz operating frequency, a power output of 3 W, a battery supply voltage of 9 Vdc, and a sinusoidal-type signal to be amplified. Both classes are evaluated through recent research literature and simulated using the PSpice® computer simulation program. Class CE and class F are found to provide efficiencies exceeding 80 percent under the given system constraints.</p. / Master of Science

The instantaneous performance of a site diversity system is analyzed. This analysis is performed using instantaneous diversity gain (a new parameter for describing diversity performance) and the correlation coefficient. Also, a relationship between the correlation coefficient and instantaneous diversity gain was established. In addition, a review of statistical diversity gain and existing models of statistical diversity gain were also presented. Measured statistical diversity gain data from the VPI&SU site diversity experiment were also presented and compared with instantaneous diversity gain. The relationship between the correlation coefficient and instantaneous diversity gain was used to present a crude model of diversity gain. This model was compared with the model of Hodge. Margin calculations were performed to display the usefulness of instantaneous diversity gain. These were performed using the VPI&SU site diversity experiment data. / Master of Science

Dual polarization allows a communication system to transfer twice as much information as a single polarized communication system, with no increase in the required bandwidth. Site diversity may be used in high frequency satellite communication systems to reduce the effects of attenuation and depolarization due to rain and ice. This thesis examines dual polarized site diversity satellite communication systems to determine how such systems would perform under operating conditions. Three diversity system models, including a new model which incorporates local weather patterns, are discussed and compared. The problem of how to select the best signals from the available diversity replicas is investigated for both PSK and FM modulation schemes. A new technique is proposed for combining the effects of attenuation. and isolation into a single criterion for FM systems. The thesis considers methods for improving dual polarized site diversity system performance. Compensation schemes, coherent signal addition, and optimum site location are investigated. A compensation scheme using pilot tones is proposed. Finally, the performance of operational PSK and FM systems is simulated using data from a VPI & SU satellite beacon experiment. / M.S.

Wireless systems, ranging from radio to optical frequencies, typically comprise two domains: the signal path and the local oscillator (LO) path. While signal processing is conventionally performed in the signal path, more recently, techniques that exploit LO-based signal processing are becoming increasingly popular. LO-based analog signal processing can be utilized for solving fundamental problems and for improving the performance of systems in a wide variety of applications that span radio to optical frequencies. In this dissertation, I explore LO-based signal processing to enable new functionalities and enhance performance in electrical, optical, and electro-optical circuits and systems. In the electro-optical domain, I use LO-based signal processing to improve the performance of a long-range Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) system. As laser nonlinearity degrades the performance of ranging and imaging systems, it is essential to address this problem. In this dissertation, to linearize a laser, an integrated continuous-time Electro-Optical Phase-Locked Loop (EOPLL) is presented with a loop bandwidth equal to its reference frequency. Despite the high bandwidth, the proposed system is spurless, which is enabled by using Single-Sideband (SSB) and Harmonic-Reject mixing (HRM) techniques. These techniques are explored in Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) design for the first time. These features result in less area consumption and loss associated with the optical part of the system and increase the precision and accuracy of our long-range FMCW LIDAR significantly. In the electrical domain, I use LO engineering to address some of the challenges that exist in three different electrical systems including mm-wave Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) systems, ultra-low power RF systems, and wideband mm-wave systems. In the first project, to alleviate the challenge of supporting a high data rate Input/Output (I/O) interface in a large-scale tiled mm-wave MIMO array, a single-wire interface (SWI) is used in this dissertation, and a 60GHz 4-element scalable MIMO transmitter (TX) prototype is designed. In our work, we use frequency-domain multiplexing (FDM) to simultaneously support the signals of four MIMO channels. Then, in our proposed FDM, HRM is utilized to generate the different frequencies at which the various IF signals are multiplexed. This enables us to multiplex and de-multiplex the four modulated signals simultaneously to/from the single-wire using multiple phases of only one LO. The technique proposed in this research significantly reduces the number of lines needed for LO and signal routing in a massive MIMO system. The second electrical project in this dissertation targets ultra-low power receivers at RF frequency. Wake-up receivers (WURX) are integral to reducing the power consumed by the main or primary RX in ultra-low power systems. Thus, the ability to share one antenna for both RXs is essential and results in a compact hybrid system. Furthermore, linearity and sensitivity are two fundamental criteria in these RXs. In order to improve the linearity of these systems, mixer-first RX architecture can be used for both RXs. However, mixer-first architecture has some drawbacks, like low gain and high noise figure (NF), which degrade the sensitivity of the system. Here, in our research, we implement a hybrid primary RX and WURX in which, first, a Quadrature Hybrid Coupler (QHC) is used to share one antenna between the two RXs and to achieve wideband input matching. Secondly, to address the problem of sensitivity in the mixer-first structure, we exploit a LO-assisted noise-canceling technique combined with a bottom-plate capacitor mixer-first receiver. This structure exploits implicit capacitive stacking which enables us to achieve passive LO-defined voltage gain, high linearity, and a low NF. In the last electrical project in this dissertation, I present a novel frequency-interleaved (FI) channel aggregation architecture for wideband mm-wave systems that relaxes the requirements of their Analog-to-Digital/Digital-to-Analog Converters (ADC/DAC) and consequently reduces the total cost and power consumption. In our proposed architecture, the input bandwidth is channelized into four sub-channels, which are individually up/downconverted from/to baseband, where they can be digitized with multiple lower rate subconverters. We use the idea of HRM in the channelizer to simultaneously down(up)convert four sub-channels with only one LO. Four chips, including two mm-wave RX and TX chips and two baseband RX and TX chips, are designed and tested to show the functionality of the entire system as a transceiver. Finally, I conclude this dissertation with an optical project which is a Silicon Photonic (SiP) simultaneous Mode and Wavelength Division (De)Multiplexer (MWD(De)MUX) for optical frequencies at C-band. I use an advanced 3D simulation tool, RSOFT software, to design and test this novel compact SiP structure. Our circuit uses a cascade of Mode Division Multiplexer (MDM) and Wavelength Division Multiplexer (WDM) stages for (de)multiplexing. A novel phase shifter introduced and used in this work is designed using two close waveguides on a CMOS compatible SiP platform, which results in reduced loss and size compared to conventional techniques.

Wireless sensor networks are becoming important in several monitoring and sensing applications. Ultra low power consumption in the sensor nodes is important for extending the battery life of the nodes. In this dissertation, two low power BFSK receiver architectures are proposed and verified with prototype implementations in silicion. A 2.4 GHz 1 Mb/s polyphase filter (PPF) BFSK receiver demonstrates ±180 ppm frequency offset tolerance (FOT) and 40 dB adjacent channel rejection (ACR) at a modulation index (MI) of 2, with a power consumption of 1.9 mW. High FOT at low MI is achieved by a frequency-to-energy conversion architecture using PPFs without any frequency correction. The proposed hybrid topology of the PPF provides an improved ACR at reduced power. To further improve the energy efficiency, a low energy 900 MHz mixer-less BFSK receiver is designed. High gain frequency-to-amplitude conversion and better sensitivity is achieved by a linear amplifier with Q-enhanced LC tank, eliminating the need for local oscillators and mixers. With a power consumption of 500 μW, the receiver achieves sensitivities of -90 dBm and -76 dBm for data rates of 0.5 Mb/s and 6 Mb/s, respectively. The energy efficiency is 80 pJ/b when operating at 6 Mb/s. / Graduation date: 2013 / Access restricted to the OSU Community at author's request from March 25, 2013 - March 25, 2014

Cognitive radios have been proposed as a new technology to counteract the spectrum scarcity issue and increase the spectral efficiency. In cognitive radios, the sparse assigned frequency bands are opened to secondary users, provided that interference induced on the primary licensees is negligible. Cognitive radios are established in two steps: the radios firstly sense the available frequency bands by detecting the presence of primary users and secondly communicate using the bands that have been identified as not in use by the primary users.<p><p>In this thesis we investigate how to improve the efficiency of cognitive radio networks when multiple cognitive radios cooperate to sense the spectrum or control their interferences. A major challenge in the design of cooperating devices lays in the need for exchange of information between these devices. Therefore, in this thesis we identify three specific types of control information exchange whose efficiency can be improved. Specifically, we first study how cognitive radios can efficiently exchange sensing information with a coordinator node when the reporting channels are noisy. Then, we propose distributed learning algorithms allowing to allocate the primary network sensing times and the secondary transmission powers within the secondary network. Both distributed allocation algorithms minimize the need for information exchange compared to centralized allocation algorithms. / Doctorat en Sciences de l'ingénieur / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished