Analysis and measurement of timing error effects in a SAW-based group demodulator

This paper examines the effect of timing errors on QPSK/FDMA signals regenerated by a SAW-based group demodulator. The presence of a timing offset not only degrades the performance of that channel, but also increases the amount of its interference into other channels. Time windowing of the input to the chirp Fourier transform is shown to reduce the impact of the timing errors, but at the cost of an increased output noise variance. Measurements are presented for the bit-error rate (BER) performance of a single channel with a fixed timing offset using a surface acoustic wave (SAW) group demodulator based on the convolve-multiply-convolve (CMC) configuration with Kaiser-Bessel windowing