Broadband high dynamic range digital receiving system for electromagnetic signals

Abstract

A method is provided for the design of a wide-band high dynamic-range electromagnetic signal receiving system. The method provides for receiving a plurality of analog signals, converting the plurality to a digital replica that can be processed to recover separate high-fidelity replicas of each individual signal in the received plurality. The method also provides increasing the signal dynamic range with a parallel architecture comprising 'p' identical parallel analog-to-digital channels wherein the value of is determined by the ratio of the largest amplitude signal to the minimum detectable signal. Further, it is demonstrated that 'p' is the fundamental limit on the number of parallel channels necessary to linearly process a specified plurality of signals containing a largest signal and a minimum detectable signal.