A Custom High Performance L-band ADC and Characterization of a First Generation DAC

Next generation GPS satellite/ground communication systems must be robust to hostile jammers which degrade link budget and desensitize reception. A proposed solution is to use frequency hopping techniques to communicate in a spectrum space free of hostile jammers and a radio in which the agility and robustness is provided by high-performance broadband data-converters. The so called software defined paradigm proposes to simplify the receiver structure from multiple receivers with dedicated band filtering to single receivers with high performance ADCs capturing the full down-converted spectrum of interest. To this end, MaXentric proposes broadband high dynamic range ADC capable of covering the broad-spectrum of interest allowing for frequency hopping. MaXentric proposes to implement the L-band data-converters in a RADHARD SOI process meeting stringent space radiation specifications. The ADC will use time-interleaving for speed enhancement, low-jitter clock generation for improved ENOB, and linear sampling techniques with calibration to meet SFDR. The program will enable simplified SWAP for GPS receiver systems through software defined radio.