Synchronous Mixing Architecture for Digital Bandwidth Interleaving Sampling System

Abstract

By using a mixer to down-convert the high frequency components of a signal, digital bandwidth interleaving (DBI) technology can simultaneously increase the sampling rate and bandwidth of the sampling system, compared to the time-interleaved and hybrid filter bank. However, the software and hardware of the classical architecture are too complicated, which also leads to poor performance. In particular, the pilot tone used to synchronize the analog and digital local oscillators (LO) of mixers intermodulates with the high frequency components of the signal, resulting in larger spurs. This paper proposes a synchronous mixing architecture for the DBI system, where the LO of the analog mixer is synchronized with the sampling clock of the analog-to-digital converter. Its hardware and software are simplified—the pilot tone used to synchronize the LOs can also be removed. An evaluation platform with a sampling rate of 250 MSPS is implemented to illustrate the performance of the new architecture. The result shows that the spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) of the new architecture is more than 20 dB higher than the classical one in a high frequency range. The rise time of a step signal of the new architecture is 0.578 ± 0.070 ns faster than the classical one with the same bandwidth (90 MHz).