Signal Reconstruction Algorithms for Time-Interleaved ADCs

Book excerpt: An analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is a key component in many electronic systems. It is used to convert analog signals to the equivalent digital form. The conversion involves sampling which is the process of converting a continuous-time signal to a sequence of discrete-time samples, and quantization in which each sampled value is represented using a finite number of bits. The sampling rate and the effective resolution (number of bits) are two key ADC performance metrics. Today, ADCs form a major bottleneck in many applications like communication systems since it is difficult to simultaneously achieve high sampling rate and high resolution. Among the various ADC architectures, the time-interleaved analog-to-digital converter (TI-ADC) has emerged as a popular choice for achieving very high sampling rates and resolutions. At the principle level, by interleaving the outputs of M identical channel ADCs, a TI-ADC could achieve the same resolution as that of a channel ADC but with M times higher bandwidth. However, in practice, mismatches between the channel ADCs result in a nonuniformly sampled signal at the output of a TI-ADC which reduces the achievable resolution. Often, in TIADC implementations, digital reconstructors are used to recover the uniform-grid samples from the nonuniformly sampled signal at the output of the TI-ADC. Since such reconstructors operate at the TI-ADC output rate, reducing the number of computations required per corrected output sample helps to reduce the power consumed by the TI-ADC. Also, as the mismatch parameters change occasionally, the reconstructor should support online reconfiguration with minimal or no redesign. Further, it is advantageous to have reconstruction schemes that require fewer coefficient updates during reconfiguration. In this thesis, we focus on reducing the design and implementation complexities of nonrecursive finite-length impulse response (FIR) reconstructors. We propose efficient reconstruction schemes for three classes of nonuniformly sampled signals that can occur at the output of TI-ADCs. Firstly, we consider a class of nonuniformly sampled signals that occur as a result of static timing mismatch errors or due to channel mismatches in TI-ADCs. For this type of nonuniformly sampled signals, we propose three reconstructors which utilize a two-rate approach to derive the corresponding single-rate structure. The two-rate based reconstructors move part of the complexity to a symmetric filter and also simplifies the reconstruction problem. The complexity reduction stems from the fact that half of the impulse response coefficients of the symmetric filter are equal to zero and that, compared to the original reconstruction problem, the simplified problem requires only a simpler reconstructor. Next, we consider the class of nonuniformly sampled signals that occur when a TI-ADC is used for sub-Nyquist cyclic nonuniform sampling (CNUS) of sparse multi-band signals. Sub-Nyquist sampling utilizes the sparsities in the analog signal to sample the signal at a lower rate. However, the reduced sampling rate comes at the cost of additional digital signal processing that is needed to reconstruct the uniform-grid sequence from the sub-Nyquist sampled sequence obtained via CNUS. The existing reconstruction scheme is computationally intensive and time consuming and offsets the gains obtained from the reduced sampling rate. Also, in applications where the band locations of the sparse multi-band signal can change from time to time, the reconstructor should support online reconfigurability. Here, we propose a reconstruction scheme that reduces the computational complexity of the reconstructor and at the same time, simplifies the online reconfigurability of the reconstructor. Finally, we consider a class of nonuniformly sampled signals which occur at the output of TI-ADCs that use some of the input sampling instants for sampling a known calibration signal. The samples corresponding to the calibration signal are used for estimating the channel mismatch parameters. In such TI-ADCs, nonuniform sampling is due to the mismatches between the channel ADCs and due to the missing input samples corresponding to the sampling instants reserved for the calibration signal. We propose three reconstruction schemes for such nonuniformly sampled signals and show using design examples that, compared to a previous solution, the proposed schemes require substantially lower computational complexity.