On the design of RF-DACs for random acquisition based reconfigurable receivers

Meeting the pressing power and bandwidth requirements of modern communication systems requires the development of highly efficient reconfigurable transceivers. On the receiver side, we present a new class of reconfigurable receiver that utilizes random projections to balance the power-bandwidth tradeoff. Such random projection front-ends are ubiquitous and allow the use of sub-Nyquist ADCs. These systems utilize high speed DACs, typically found in transmitters, to generate high fidelity random signals. The emergence of RF-DACs, used for direct digital-to-RF synthesis, can be leveraged for random projection reconfigurable receivers. However, the need for high output power and linearity in both the transmitter and receiver DACs forces an evaluation of RF-DAC topologies with respect to drain efficiency. In this paper, the power efficiencies of several RF-DAC topologies are compared.