The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Dec. 25, 2001
Filed:
Dec. 22, 1999
Wolfgang Oberhammer, Ottawa, CA;
Bixia Li, Plano, TX (US);
Nortel Networks Limited, Montreal, CA;
Abstract
A digitizer with increased dynamic range is provided by applying varying gains/attenuations to an input signal and feeding the resulting scaled signals to several conventional analog-to-digital converters to be digitized. The digitized version of the largest scaled signal which does not result in its respective analog-to-digital converter from saturating is selected by a multiplexer to be fed through as the digitizer output. Each of the gains(attenuations) differ by multiples of approximately 6 dB, since one bit in an ADC represents this value. The multiplexer outputs a digital sample size which is larger than that of the analog-to-digital converters and with the selected digitized version being output as the appropriate subset of the larger sample size to account for the gain(attenuation) of the selected signal. Preferably, this is used in a wideband receiver to increase the dynamic range of the receiver.