Integrated transceivers for UWB breast cancer imaging: Architecture and circuit constraints

We present a behavioral analysis of two different transceiver architectures for UWB breast cancer imaging employing a SFCW radar system. A mathematical model of the direct conversion and super heterodyne architectures together with a numerical breast phantom are developed. FDTD simulations data are used on the behavioral model to investigate the limits of both architectures from a circuit-level point of view. The result is that the simplicity of the direct conversion makes the receiver more robust toward the critical circuit impairments for this application, that is the random phase mismatches between the TX and RX local oscillators.