σ δ ADC Based Frequency Error Measurement in Single Carrier Digital Modulations

The paper deals with the functional block architecture implementing the method to measure the carrier frequency error of the single carrier digital modulations. The method is able to operate on the modulations M-ary amplitude shift keying, M-ary phase shift keying and M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation used in the telecommunication systems. The functional block architecture, is obtained from the Software Radio architecture, and is based on the cascade of the analog to digital converter (ADC), the digital down converter and the base band processing. Looking to the implementation in measurement instrumentation, the performance of this cascaded architecture is investigated by considering three different ADC architectures. They are based on: (i) the pipeline, (ii) the single quantizer loop SigmaDelta modulator, and (Hi) the multistage noise shaper (MASH) SigmaDelta modulator. Numerical tests (i) confirm the important rule of the ADC in this architecture, and (ii) highlight the interesting performance of the MASH based SigmaDelta modulator for use in advanced measurement instrument