Ultimate Transmission

Over several decades, advances in electronics miniaturization have been the engine for cost and performance gains in both military and commercial systems. More recently, breakthroughs in silicon-based technologies have accelerated the shift towards CMOS system-on-chip (SoC) solutions, combining complex radio-frequency (RF), analog and digital functionality. These advances, along with the introduction of newer generations of communication systems and the unprecedented surge in demand for high data rates, motivated the search for a purely digital solution for all radio standards. This, in turn, with the coexistence of the software revolution has called for the programmability of the communication systems through software to implement a software radio (SR). The concept of SR was introduced in the late 1990s as a successor to digital radio (DR). It referred to a radio transceiver where the antenna signal is sampled directly by an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in the receive path and coupled directly to a digital-toanalog converter (DAC) in the transmit path.