Reconfigurable Matched Filtering Using Wideband Margin-Computing Correlators: Applications in Radar and Communication Signal Processing

Correlators are fundamental building blocks in radar and communication signal-processing applications. In this paper, a wideband RF correlator based on the margin-computing (MC) paradigm and its applications to radar and communication signal processing are presented. The proposed analog corre-lator replaces traditional multiply-and-accumulate correlators with analog addition-and-thresholding to enable energy-efficient correlation, making it hardware-friendly, scalable, and power-efficient. The prototype IC in 65nm CMOS supports 5GS/s inputs, a large correlation length of 1024, and 8-bit computing accuracy with a high energy efficiency of 152TOPs/J. Measured results of the baseband and direct-RF wavelet processing of impulse radar signatures across varying bandwidths and carrier frequencies are presented. Measured results of code-modulated communication systems with correlator-based signal processing for code-synchronization and code-despreading are also reported.