Demonstration of an efficient high speed communication link based on regenerative sampling

High-speed communication systems nowadays often face technological limitations, e.g., when operating at very high center frequencies or when adopting novel processes like printed transistors. These scaling issues often result in low single-stage amplifier gain, which makes classic broadband communication architectures, most notably the homodyne transceiver, inefficient in terms of power consumption, implementation size and cost. For the first time, we demonstrate the feasibility of a full transmission system for a completely different architecture that allows escaping the gain limitations. It utilizes regenerative sampling in a super-regenerative oscillator to repetitively amplify CW or pulsed signals with a single low gain amplifier in order to achieve a high overall gain tunable over a large range. This capability enables further improvements like a synthesizer-less phase sensitive receiver based on delayed self-mixing. In this paper, we demonstrate the successful transmission of 8-PSK modulated pulsed signals with a data rate of 450 Mbit/s at 5.6 GHz and verify that phase regeneration from pulses generated by free running oscillators has no notable SNR drawback compared to classic systems.