A 130nm CMOS polar quantizer for cellular applications

A polar quantizer is presented for detection and quantization of modulated signals in cellular applications. It consists of amplitude and phase quantizers. A time-to-digital converter (TDC) is designed to measure and quantize the phase, while a typical ADC is used for amplitude quantization. Polar quantizer significantly reduces the sensitivity of the quantizer to amplitude resolution. The 10 bit polar quantizer fabricated in 130nm CMOS achieves 5.5dB of SQNR improvement compared to rectangular quantizer for signal bandwidths as high as 20MHz.