Non-idealities compensation in full-digital receivers with application to Ultra-Wide Band

Nowadays many transceivers adhere to full-digital design principles, with the basic operations performed in the analog domain (filtering, down-conversion) and the whole remaining processing postponed to the digital domain (including matched filtering and synchronization). Though the operations in the analog front-end are ideally reversible, hence no signal degradation should occur before the analog-to-digital conversion (thus preserving the information integrity) however the intrinsic non-idealities in the circuitry may introduce a certain level of distortion. In this paper we provide a simple and flexible approach for the compensation of these effects. We derive useful formulas for obtaining a digital compensation filter by means of a direct transformation of the analog system coefficients. This allows to easily perform the compensation in the digital domain via Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). To illustrate the procedure, the case-study of a real Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) receiver is addressed. Numerical results are shown and sample code is also provided for an easy implementation.