Software-defined radio receiver: dream to reality

This article describes a fully integrated 90 nm CMOS software-defined radio receiver operating in the 800 MHz to 5 GHz band. Unlike the classical SDR paradigm, which digitizes the whole spectrum uniformly, this receiver acts as a signal conditioner for the analog-to-digital converters, emphasizing only the wanted channel. Thus, the ADCs operate with modest resolution and sample rate, consuming low power. This approach makes portable SDR a reality.