A High Dynamic Range Envelop Detector for Heterodyne Receiver Architecture
Résumé
Energy detection (ED) has been of interest for
various applications ranging from very low frequency biomedical
signal read-out to high frequency wireless communication. The
analog implementation of the ED requires circuits with a nonlinear
transfer characteristics which can be obtained through
squaring or rectification. Comparison of these two methods is
presented and implementation limitations are detailed. Interesting
characteristics of rectifiers, derived from ideal transfer
characteristics and from non-ideal circuit implementations, encourage
rectifier’s use in the ED rather than the squarer. A high
speed and high precision current mode full-wave rectifier was
implemented in GF 22FDX technology. Our circuit achieves a
60 dB dynamic range and 100MHz bandwidth with an ultra-low
power consumption of 4.3μW from 0.8V voltage supply.