Compressed sensing based UWB receiver: Hardware compressing and FPGA reconstruction

A low sampling rate approach for recovering ultra wide band (UWB) signals is proposed, using distributed amplifiers (DAs) and low speed analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and based on the theory of compressed sensing. A microwave circuit consisting of a bank of DAs, followed by a bank of ADCs, is designed to implement analog compressing, where the elements of measurement matrix are realized by picosecond delay tap and flexible gain coefficients in DAs. Numerical simulation shows that a bank of eight DAs and ADCs with 500MHz sampling rate can almost perfectly recover a 100ps-resolution UWB echo signal in the noiseless case. For recovering the UWB signals in a real-time way, issues in field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation are discussed.