Innovative Wideband All Digital Receiver (ADR)

ISL propose to combine state-of-the-art advances in signal processing algorithms and architectures and superconducting electronics to design and fabricate an essentially all-digital receiver (ADR) that will both mitigate the effects of EMI and reduce digital storage requirements. An innovative Analog-to-Information (A-to-I) converter approach will be designed that eliminates many of the redundant bits during the conversion process. The unique aspect of ISL's approach is the use of linear predictive processing in conjunction with implicit non-uniform sampling. Non-uniform sampling is required to incorporate a linear predictor into the concept to achieve data reduction. In this approach, the RF signal from the antenna is bandpass filtered with a pre-selection filter that uses High-Temperature Superconducting (HTS) filters in order to define the input bandwidth and suppress out-of-band interference. The difference of the output from the pre-selection filter and the output of the linear prediction filter generates a prediction error signal. For many military systems the single most important piece of prior knowledge is that the desired signals are weak with respect to the other signals within the band. This observation means that in many applications, prediction of the strong signals followed by subtracting them out of the composite in-band signal mix, is an attractive method to reduce the dynamic range of the received signal and thus the number of digital bits required to represent the signal.