System Design of a Configurable Highly Digital UMTS/NAVSAT RF-Receiver

This paper introduces a combined UMTS/NAVSAT receiver architecture with one common reconfigurable radio frequency (RF) front-end. After a review of the state-of-the-art for UMTS and NAVSAT receivers, a configurable UMTS/-NAVSAT architecture is proposed. The investigated concept is based on a digital-front-end (DFE) to prevent duplication of hardware, which will result in considerably lower costs. The integration of digital signal processing block into the RFIC is further favored by the advent of RF-CMOS as mainstream technology for RFICs, due to the availability of high speed and low power digital logic blocks. The DFE includes highly reconfigurable filter structures, which enable channel selection for different signal bandwidths according to the configured mode. The analog to digital conversion is carried out with a high dynamic-range/low-power DeltaSigma-analog-to-digital-converter (ADC). This simplifies the design of the analog anti-aliasing filter considerably