An Adaptive Digital Front-End for Multimode Wireless Receivers

The ongoing evolution from 2G to 3G and beyond requires multimode operation of wireless cellular transceivers. This paper discusses the design of an adaptive wireless receiver for multimode operation and power efficiency. This is achieved by sharing digital signal processing stages for all operation modes and adapting them such that performance requirements are met at a minimum power consumption. The flexibility a digital front-end introduces in combination with an analog zero-intermediate-frequency receiver is studied with respect to the main cellular communication standards (Global System for Mobile Communication, Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution, Wide-Band Code-Division Multiple Access (WCDMA)/High-Speed Downlink Packet Access, and CDMA2000 and satellite navigation systems (Galileo), with considerations of impacts on the capability of an implementation of a software-defined radio. The proposed approach is verified by simulations exhibiting an error-vector magnitude of 2.9% in Universal Mobile Telecommunications System mode while the estimated power consumption can be reduced by 62% versus full featured mode at reasonable degradation in modulation quality.