A digital front-end supported frequency agile multi-standard wireless receiver

This paper presents a flexible multi-standard receiver architecture that extends the well known direct conversion receiver (DCR). With high dynamic-range/low-power sigma-delta analog-to-digital converters (ADC) and digital signal processing functions locally on the radio frequency integrated circuit (RFIC) a receiver with relaxed requirements for the analog part and a variable bandwidth channel filtering in the digital domain can be realized. Since analog building blocks have limited reconfiguration capabilities by nature of their implementation, the extension of the conventional analog signal processing blocks by a digital front-end (DFE) greatly enhances the flexibility of the RFIC. Key building blocks for the proposed receiver architecture, such as tunable RF filters, ADC and digital filters are discussed.