Communication Transceiver Research Articles

New Standardized EMC Evaluation Methods for Communication Transceivers

This letter introduces EMC evaluation methods and requirements for communication transceiver integrated circuits (ICs) described in the new International Electronic Commission standard series IEC62228. Based on typical results of CAN transceivers, a cross comparison of measurement results on IC level, component level, and vehicle level will be provided. The correlation of results and the potential to harmonize requirements in respect to test methods and effort will be discussed.

A Four-Camera VGA-Resolution Capsule Endoscope System With 80-Mb/s Body Channel Communication Transceiver and Sub-Centimeter Range Capsule Localization

A small form-factor, lightweight wireless capsule endoscope (WCE) system with body channel communication (BCC) transceiver ICs is proposed for VGA-resolution image transferring and capsule localization. The transceiver ICs are composed of capsule chip and receiver chip, implemented in a 65-nm CMOS process. In the capsule side, the proposed system provides 360° image capturing through four-camera integration to reduce the miss rate. Also, a dual-band pulse-shaping BCC transmitter is proposed to enable low-power (<1 mW), high-speed (80 Mb/s) image transmission. In the receiver side, contact attenuation compensated-received signal strength indicator (CAC-RSSI) is proposed to increase the capsule localization accuracy. The external system is composed of eight-receiver nodes that allow signal demodulation and localization of the capsule. To reduce transceiver payload and system power consumption, image encoder is implemented in the capsule. The transceiver IC is integrated into the capsule system and verified with body mimicking phantom. The proposed system satisfies compatibility with medical grade diagnosis by operating longer than 8 h with 4 fps and 12 h with 2 fps with conventional two silver oxide 55-mA · h coin batteries. The tested localization accuracy shows less than sub-centimeter range.

Energy Efficient Flash ADC With PVT Variability Compensation Through Advanced Body Biasing

This brief presents the design of an energy efficient flash analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) with threshold inverter quantiser comparator employing advanced body biasing to compensate for the effects of parameter variability. The proposed calibration scheme is verified against process, voltage, and temperature corners as well as random parameter variability (mismatch). Two proof-of-concept ADCs of 4- and 6-bit precision are designed and verified in simulations in 28 nm fully depleted silicon on insulator technology. The 6-bit converter achieves sampling rate of 3 GS/s, energy efficiency per conversion step below 20 fJ, and precision of 5.2 effective number of bits. The proposed ADC architecture is dedicated to high-speed and low-precision applications, such as communication transceivers and data acquisition systems where area and energy efficiency are paramount.

Double-Sided Massive MIMO Transceivers for mmWave Communications

We propose practical transceiver structures for double-sided massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Unlike standard massive MIMO, both transmit and receive sides are equipped with high-dimensional antenna arrays. We leverage the multi-layer filtering architecture and propose novel layered transceiver schemes with practical channel state information requirements to simplify the complexity of our double-sided massive MIMO system. We conduct a comprehensive simulation campaign to investigate the performance of the proposed transceivers under different channel propagation conditions and to identify the most suitable strategy. Our results show that the covariance matrix eigenfilter design at the outer transceiver layer combined with maximum eigenmode transmission precoding/minimum mean square error combining at the inner transceiver layer yields the best achievable sum rate performance for different propagation conditions and multi-user interference levels.

The Miniature Optical Communication Transceiver—A Compact, Power-Efficient Lasercom System for Deep Space Nanosatellites

Optical communication is becoming more prevalent in orbit due to the need for increased data throughput. Nanosatellites, which are satellites that typically weigh less than 10 kg, are also becoming more common due to lower launch costs that enable the rapid testing of technology in a space environment. Nanosatellites are cheaper to launch than their larger counterparts and may be a viable option for communicating beyond Earth’s orbit, but have strict Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) requirements. The Miniature Optical Communication Transceiver (MOCT) is a compact optical transceiver designed to provide modest data rates to SWaP constrained platforms, like nanosatellites. This paper will cover the optical amplifier characterization and simulated performance of the MOCT amplifier design that produces 1 kW peak power pulses and closes three optical links which include Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to Earth, LEO to LEO, and Moon to Earth. Additionally, a benchtop version of the amplifier design was constructed and was able to produce amplified pulses with 1.37 W peak power, including a 35.7% transmit optics loss, at a pump power of 500 mW. Finally, the modulator, seed laser, amplifier, receiver, and time-to-digital converter were all used together to measure the Bit Error Ratio (BER), which was 0.00257 for a received optical peak power of 176 nW.

Silicon Photonics in Optical Coherent Systems

Optical coherent systems, which employ the interference of a received optical signal with a local laser to achieve high signal-to-electrical-noise ratio and capture the magnitude, phase, and polarization of the signal, have grown dramatically in the last decade due to improvements in digital signal processors. The optics of both the transmitter and receiver have grown in complexity, and its deployment has benefitted greatly from the integration offered by silicon photonics. Today’s coherent systems range from 1.2-Tb/s fiber-optic communication transceivers to optical coherence tomography medical instruments. This paper will give an overview of optical coherent systems, present the state-of-the-art in silicon photonic components shipping today, and discuss where silicon photonics is going in this field.

Active Compact Wearable Body Area Networks for Wireless Communication, Medical and IoT Applications

The development of compact wearable antennas and transceivers for communication, IoT (Internet of Things), and biomedical systems will be presented in this paper. Development of Compact efficient wearable antennas is one of the major challenges in development of wearable communication, IoT, and medical systems. The main goal of wireless body area networks (BANs), WBANs, is to provide continuously medical data to the physician. Body area network (BAN) antennas should be flexible, lightweight, compact, and have low production cost. However, low efficiency is the major disadvantage of small printed antennas. Microstrip antennas resonant frequency is altered, due to environment conditions, different antenna locations, and different system operation modes. These disadvantages may be solved by using compact active and tunable antennas. A new class of wideband active wearable antennas for medical applications is presented in this paper. Amplifiers may be connected to the wearable antenna feed line to increase the system dynamic range. Small lightweight batteries supply the bias voltage to the active components. An active dual polarized antenna is presented in this paper. The active dual polarized antenna gain is 14 ± 3 dB for frequencies ranging from 380 to 600 MHz. The active transmitting dual polarized antenna output power is around 18 dBm. A voltage-controlled diode, varactor, may be used to control the antenna electrical performance at different environments. For example, an antenna located in patient stomach area has VSWR (Voltage Standing Wave Ratio) better than 2:1 at 434 MHz. However, if the antenna will be placed on the patient back, it may resonate at 420 MHz. By varying the varactor bias voltage, the antenna resonant frequency may be shifted from 420 to 434 MHz. An ultra-wideband passive and active printed slot antenna may be employed in wideband wearable communication systems. The active slot antenna gain is 13 ± 2 dB for frequencies from 800 MHz to 3 GHz.

Design and feasibility study of human body communication transceiver based on FDM

The body area networks (BAN) are built by many wearable sensors to record, monitor or control the vital signals within the human body continuously. Human body communication (HBC) is a novel physical layer method to implement the BAN with low power consumption, low radiation, and strong anti-interference. However, the most existing HBC rarely consider the situation in which multiple sensors transmit data at the same time. The aim of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of frequency division multiplexing for human body communication multiplex data transmission. The signal was injected into the human body, and the human channel gain was measured by the spectrum analyzer. Two frequency signals were selected with smaller gain to design the transceiver. The transmitter used OOK modulation technology to design each functional unit, and the receiver recovered the original signal with a non-coherent demodulation method. The experimental results show that after the dual signals were transmitted through the human body, the receiver could recover the original signal correctly. In both static and dynamic situations, even if the transmission rate was as high as 115.2 kb/s, the bit error rate was only 10-4. The frequency division multiplexing scheme can be selected for multi-channel data transmission in human body communication.

Design of Reliable Body Channel Communication Transceiver with Spread Spectrum Clock Generator and PNR Generator

In this work, the communication of a channel in the human body has a characteristic (time-domain) which can be measured at various distances in transmission and various frequencies of a signal by the printed circuit board-an analog frontend board (PCB-AFE) support. Besides, for the wideband signal of Body Channel Communication (BCC), a human body skin acts within a range of 1 Mb/s to 40 Mb/s as the transmission medium. This communication is more stable and attenuating low power while comparing with all another transmission medium in wireless. Moreover, due to the motion of a human body, this communication doesn't get affected. Though, the body antenna gives effects in the communication of a channel of the human body by occurs some interference. The Manchester data acts as encoder and decoder in transmitter and receiver parts respectively, in an AFE-PCB the Manchester encoder data is amplified after receiving the data from end to end channel of a human body. The data quality is improved by 7X sampler in clock data recovery (CDR) circuit. Therefore, the proposed design of reliable BCC Transceiver with SSCG and PNR Generator is processed in XilinxISE14.5, ModelSim Simulator 6.5a (Quartus II 8.1), and Micro wind software tools. It is also implemented in a XilinxXC9572XL kit. The power consumption and delay is reduced up to 90%, speed is increased up to 50% and leakage current is reduced up to 80% in the transmitter part.

Ground Defected Planar Super-wideband Antenna: A Suitable Transceiver for Short Distance Wireless Communication

A planar microstrip patch super-wideband antenna is presented for short distance wireless communication applications. The antenna is comprised of a simple patch and a ground plane and etched on two sides of a 1.6 mm-thick standard FR4 substrate material with a relative permittivity of 4.5 and loss tangent (0.02). The proposed antenna possesses a compact size of 29 × 20.5 mm2 with an electrical dimension of 0.25 λ × 0.18 λ. To enhance the operating bandwidth, the ground plane is modified by adding seven small rectangular slots on its upper side. Through numerical studies, it is found that insertion of the slots enhances the coupling between the patch and ground plane resulting in achievement of a super-wide operating band. From the measurements, it is observed that the fabricated prototype antenna has a bandwidth from 2.63 to more than 18 GHz, a symmetric omnidirectional radiation characteristic and the maximum peak gain of 5.85 dBi which makes it a suitable transceiver for short distance communication applications.

100-Gb/s Electro-Absorptive Duobinary Modulation of an InP-on-Si DFB Laser

100-Gb/s single-channel optical data communication transceivers can provide a compact and cost-effective solution for the exponentially growing data-center traffic. One of the enabling technologies is electro-absorption-modulated single-mode lasers which are very compact, efficient, and fast. In this letter, such a transmitter integrated on a silicon photonics platform is demonstrated. While low loss and high contrast waveguides are provided by Si photonics, the gain and efficient electro-absorption are provided by the InP-based multi-quantum-well structure. A lumped electro-absorption modulator integrated with a distributed feedback laser is designed and fabricated in this platform. The epitaxial stack is identical for the laser and the modulator, which eases the fabrication process considerably. In this way, we successfully demonstrate 100-Gb/s single-channel electrical duobinary optical data transport over ~100 m of fiber with a bit error rate of 1.6e-3.

A Design of Multichannel Data Transmission Through Power Line Communication

Smart Metering in the power grid is the present popular technology in and around the world. Future Generation is requiring new method for data transfer. This paper introduces a novel method called Power Line Communication (PLC) transceivers. PLC has many number of smart grid applications. This work proposes mainly about the transmission of data’s through Power Line. This work includes both electrical and electronic concept. Here, transmission process takes place through electrical line by using electronic equipment. This paperaddresses the important role of transferring data’s from one place to other. In this concept, dc loads are controlled by giving commands through power line. This work does not require additional medium for transmitting data’s. This paper reduces the human efforts and systematic transmission takes place. In this work, data transmission through power line communication takes place by passing constant 5v. Hence fluctuations are avoided in PLC transceivers, this protects the electronic device and dc load from damage. Here the dc loads are operated by giving ON and OFF commands. These commands can be coded in binary form or it can also be variables. Voltage sensors are used for sensing the current at the receiver (dc loads). The current which is sensed by the sensors are stored by using batteries. These currents can be retrieved for future use. This paperprovides advancement in data transmission process for future generation.

Digitally-intensive transceivers for future mobile communications\u2014emerging trends and challenges

This article presents an overview of the major trends and challenges involved with the design of multi-band, multi-standard digitally-intensive radio frequency transceivers for next generation mobile communications. In addition, we discuss in detail one aspect of the implementation challenges, namely the occurrence and cancellation of self-interference especially in carrier aggregation modes. For that, we present a novel digital cancellation technique to jointly compensate the self-interference caused by transmit (Tx) modulated spurs and Tx second order intermodulation distortion products (IMD2) in the receiver. This architecture exploits the underlying relation between both types of interference and offers a low-complexity solution to mitigate the Tx-IMD2 interference. Simulation results show, that the proposed technique significantly suppresses both types of interference and restores the signal-to-noise ratio of the wanted signal within 0.3 dB from its value in the absence of interference, thereby achieving 30 dB of cancellation.

An Accurate Transmitting Power Control Method in Wireless Communication Transceivers

Power control circuits are widely used in transceivers aiming at stabilizing the transmitted signal power to a specified value, thereby reducing power consumption and interference to other frequency bands. In order to overcome the shortcomings of traditional modes of power control, this paper proposes an accurate signal power detection method by multiplexing the receiver and realizes transmitting power control in the digital domain. The simulation results show that this novel digital power control approach has advantages of small delay, high precision and simplified design procedure. The proposed method is applicable to transceivers working at large frequency dynamic range, and has good engineering practicability.

A 1.1-mW Ground Effect-Resilient Body-Coupled Communication Transceiver With Pseudo OFDM for Head and Body Area Network

This paper presents a body-coupled communication (BCC) transceiver (TRX) that mitigates all the practical impairments of the body channel at once. The proposed pseudo orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (P-OFDM) TRX combines baseband BPSK-OFDM with frequency-shift keying (FSK) to alleviate the impacts of variable ground effect and variable skin-electrode contact impedance, which have been the two major issues on the BCC. It can tolerate up to 20 dB of channel gain variation with measured bit error rate improvement of >70% compared to FSK modulation alone. The RC relaxed contact impedance monitor continuously monitors and compensates the variable skin-electrode contact impedance at both transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX). The proposed power-gated 8-point inverse fast Fourier transform/fast Fourier transform with no floating-point multipliers (FPMs) reduces the gate count and power by 54% and 30% compared to conventional FPMs, respectively. Additionally, the simple floating-point adder (FPA) reduces the gate count and energy consumption by 34% and 20% compared to conventional FPAs, respectively. A high input impedance glitch-free FSK demodulation RX with variable threshold limiter and all digital cycle correction is also proposed to support a scalable data rate (200 Kbps-2 Mbps). The 0.54 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> TRX in 65-nm CMOS consumes 1.1 mW.

Integrated Circuit Technology for Next Generation Point-of-Care Spectroscopy Applications

Point-of-care personalized medicine and home diagnostics are emerging topics that can help to master the challenges of aging societies. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy is one of the most promising sensing principles because it enables the detection of proteins, metabolites, and reactive oxygen species, which play crucial roles in a large number of diseases, with high specificity. To provide a self-contained introduction to the topic, this article starts with a description of the basic working principle of magnetic resonance spectroscopy, highlighting the similarities and differences compared to conventional impedance spectroscopy methods. Focusing on the two specific techniques of NMR and ESR spectroscopy, we explain how miniaturized systems co-integrating detectors and the signal processing electronics on a single chip are a key enabler for portable, low-cost spectrometry systems. These systems bear many similarities to conventional communication transceivers and can therefore largely benefit from recent advances in communication circuits as well as entirely new detection principles such as VCObased detection, which are enabled by the use of modern nanometer-scaled integrated circuit technologies. An overview of the current state of the art of such miniaturized magnetic resonance spectrometers is presented, which both highlights the excellent new possibilities associated with these systems and at the same time outlines the current challenges and future research directions in this emerging field of research.

An Overview of Sustainable Green 5G Networks

The stringent requirements of a 1000x increase in data traffic and 1 ms round-trip latency have made limiting the potentially tremendous ensuing energy consumption one of the most challenging problems for the design of the upcoming 5G networks. To enable sustainable 5G networks, new technologies have been proposed to improve the system energy efficiency, and alternative energy sources are introduced to reduce our dependence on traditional fossil fuels. In particular, various 5G techniques target the reduction of the energy consumption without sacrificing the quality of service. Meanwhile, energy harvesting technologies, which enable communication transceivers to harvest energy from various renewable resources and ambient radio frequency signals for communication, have drawn significant interest from both academia and industry. In this article, we provide an overview of the latest research on both green 5G techniques and energy harvesting for communication. In addition, some technical challenges and potential research topics for realizing sustainable green 5G networks are also identified.

Consumer LED lamp with ODAC technology for high-speed visible light communications

Optical digital-to-analog converters (ODACs) were recently proposed to mitigate the non-linear characteristic of light emitting diodes (LEDs) and to simplify the transceiver in optical wireless communication systems. This paper describes the implementation and performance of an ODAC lamp built with commercial phosphor coated LEDs. It is shown to have sufficient performance to cope with data-rates compatible with those recommended for Ultra HD quality internet download speed (25Mbps), despite the very low bandwidth of these LEDs. Also, the structure of a low-cost and high-speed OFDM-based Visible Light Communication transceiver, based on commercial LEDs and off-the-shelf components, is presented. This solution does not require D/A conversion or complex LED driving circuitry in the transmitter, which are usually seen as limiting factors to the deployment of high-speed VLC systems in the consumer LED lighting market.

Measurements and characterization of power transformer and low voltage access network for NB‐PLC

SummarySeveral techniques for a state‐of‐the‐art advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) within the smart grid are being extensively studied and evaluated around the world. Advanced metering infrastructure provides an enhanced and efficient energy management infrastructure that can facilitate the latest demands of electric utilities, consumers, and smart grid. In the past few years, standardization process for the implementation of AMI using narrowband power line communications (NB‐PLC) transceivers has been completed by ITU‐T and IEEE. This paper is focused on the utilization of CENELEC band of NB‐PLC for deployment aspects. The power transformer model of 200 and 75 kVA transformers for 9 to 90 kHz frequency range that lies in CENELEC‐A band of NB‐PLC is also proposed. The proposed model is more simple than previously presented models in the literature and has the capability to evaluate the transformers working not only under normal condition but also under resonance condition for frequency of interest. Moreover, the efficient procedure for field measurements that provides a generalized NB‐PLC channel model for low voltage access network to deploy AMI within Lahore, Pakistan, is presented. A Simulink model is developed to validate the results. The analysis of measured and simulated results illustrates a close agreement of channel transfer functions. This research work proposes an improved and more accurate NB‐PLC channel model especially for South Asian countries.

Ultra-thin metasurface microwave flat lens for broadband applications.

We demonstrate a metasurface-based ultrathin flat lens operating at microwave frequencies. A series of subwavelength metallic split-ring resonators, which are sandwiched between two cross-polarized metallic gratings, are defined to obtain a radially symmetric parabolic phase distribution, covering relative phase differences ranging from 0 to 2.5π radians to create a lens. The tri-layer lens exhibits focusing/collimating of broadband microwaves from 7.0 to 10.0 GHz, with a gain enhancement of 17 dBi at a central wavelength 9.0 GHz while fed by a rectangular horn antenna. The measured focal length agrees reasonably well with design, achieving a 3 dB directionality <4.5° and confirming high-quality beam collimation along the propagation direction. The demonstrated metasurface flat lens enables light-weight, low-cost, and easily deployable flat transceivers for microwave communication, detection, and imaging applications.