Flexible Architectures for Concurrent Reception of Multiple RF Carriers and Compressed-Sampling Signal Detection in Frequency and Direction-of-Arrival

The modulated-clock downconversion mixer (MC-DM) and the antenna-weight-modulated phased-array (AWM-PA) are explored as key enablers of ambient-aware, opportunistic receivers in emerging 5G deployments. The benefits of the MC-DM is demonstrated first with an out-of-channel interferer reflecting, inter-band carrier aggregation receiver architecture where the RF carrier combination is selected simply by programming the frequency of the CW waveform used to modulate the mixer clock. Second, a wideband spectrum scanner architecture utilizing pseudo-random modulation of the downconversion mixer clock and Compressed-Sampling (CS) DSP is explored where a few large interferers are detected in ns time. The benefits of the AWM-PA is demonstrated with a phased-array architecture utilizing pseudo-random modulation of the antenna weights and CS DSP where a few large DoAs are detected in us time.