A review of Software Defined Radio enabling technologies

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art in microwave technology by investigating the most important elements of transceivers. It identifies the enabling technologies and research areas in radio frequency engineering that may facilitate the development of Software Defined Radios. Receiver architectures are also discussed and their viability for a reconfigurable radio application is investigated. The design of tunable radio frequency components, linear and power efficient amplifiers as well as linear mixers, and interference rejection techniques are the identified long term research areas.