Demonstration of a Walsh-based Arbitrary Waveform Generator using Components Off-The-Shelf

An innovative scheme to convert signal from digital to analog is investigated in this paper. The Walsh transform allows to perform a direct and an arbitrary waveform generation without any classical radio-frequency circuitry. The modulated signal is encoded by coefficients which represent its carrier frequency and its envelope. We present a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) using Components off-the-shelf (COTS) to demonstrate a low-frequency arbitrary waveform generator (AWG). The system is composed of digital signal processing using Matlab code, a FPGA, digital step attenuators, DAC and an active combiner. We exhibit measurements results of modulated signals between 0 and 4.16MHz with an output power around 0dBm.