LNA linearization solution for direct conversion receiver using under-sampling technique in reference receiver

Abstract

The paper proposes a method for linearizing low noise amplifiers (LNAs) in multichannel direct conversion receivers. The proposed direct conversion receiver (DCR) uses a linear reference receiver to extract distortion information, which is then fed to an adaptive circuit for linearizing the main channel signal. The proposed DCR differs from prior LNA linearization techniques in that the reference channel in the proposed DCR uses analog to digital converter (ADC) with an undersampling technique to extract reference information. The low-speed ADC also serves as a downconverter, shifting radio frequency (RF) signal to baseband and allowing for all further linearization processing to be performed digitally at a low-sampling data rate. This significantly reduces cost, design complexity, and energy consumption. The effectiveness of the proposed design is theoretically verified through MATLAB simulation and practically measured for a 65 Mhz band of ultra-high frequency (UHF) DCR capable of simultaneously receiving four 16–QAM channels of the same bandwidth of 4 Mhz. The MATLAB software simulation results show that the proposed approach significantly improved the signal-to-noise and distortion ratio (SNDR) for the channel of interest by approximately 30 dB in the worst distorted channel. For hardware implementation, the distorted signals are sampled from a commercial LNA (ZFL–500LN+) by a customized FPGA board. Results from measurements show an improvement of 14.6% for error vector magnitude (EVM) in a strong distortion scenario of 16–QAM modulation signal.