Smart AMS System for Cyber Physical System

In this period when networked computing systems are increasingly present in our everyday lives and electronic systems are moving towards increasing interaction with the physical world, the computer and physical worlds merge to evolve into Cyber Physical Systems This merger aims to increase the adaptability, autonomy, efficiency, functionality, reliability and security of the future systems.

The C2S team is known internationally for its capabilities to integrate digital intelligence into AMS and RF Systems-on-Chip such as Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADC) or RF receivers for cognitive radio. By combining its expertise in physical CMOS chip realization with its experience in signal processing and its knowledge of other network layers for which LTCI skills are recognized, the group designs high-performance AMS & RF SoCs. The objective is the development of elements or « basic bricks », allowing the interfacing of the connected objects system on one side with the physical world via sensors and on the other side with the core of the system via communications, in particular RF.

C2S expertise

• Architectural breakthrough

  • Transceivers in specific environment, very low power consumption

  • Agile, reconfigurable or broadband circuits and systems

• Innovative algorithms

  • Digital correction of RF imperfections

Full presentation of the group (Nov 2016)

Active projects

Analog RF Predistortion for Small-Cell 5G Wireless Nodes

Denser deployment of highly-integrated, low-cost, low-power and high-performance small-cell base stations (picocells and femtocells) will play a key role in realizing 1000X network capacity objective of the future 5G wireless networks. These base stations should be able to handle signals with very high bandwidths (> 100 MHz) and high peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR), with very high linearity and efficiency. Power Amplifier (PA) consumes the majority (>60%) of the base station power, whose linearity comes at the cost of efficiency. In the context of small-cell base stations, the usage of conventional baseband digital predistortion (DPD), to linearize the PA becomes prohibitively power hungry and demands for at least five times bandwidth requirement of the whole transmitter path. Analog RF Predistortion (ARFPD) proposed recently, that can address even the PA memory effects appears as a very promising alternative to DPD.

Radio receiver for space astrophysical measurements

Radio receivers located in outer space avoid many of the ground-based observatories problems, such as distortion of electromagnetic radiation and the Earth’s ionospheric cutoff frequency. However, they suffer from strong restrictions on storage capacity, energy consumption and transmission rate. To overcome these challenges, sampling architectures should be reviewed and improved. Compressed sensing (Compressive sampling, CS) provides a promising data acquisition technique for applications that require a limited number of measurements and leads to the development of a new type of converter: the Analog to Information Converter (AIC). Unlike standard Analog to Digital converters (ADC), AIC can sample at a lower rate than that prescribed by Nyquist Shannon, exploiting the sparsity of signals. Hence, storage capacity is enhanced and power consumption is reduced.

Direct RF-to-digital Delta Sigma receiver

Today receivers must meet very complex sets of test scenarios originating from various standards as well as the management of their mutual interference. The out-of-band (OOB) linearity poses a major challenge both in cellular frequency division duplex (FDD) systems, like WCDMA/HSPA, and in multi-standard devices. A very good candidate for implementing flexible receivers is direct RF-to-Digital Delta Sigma receiver (DDSR). This novel receiver architecture has recently been proposed, promising attractive advantages, such as a tunable center frequency and bandwidth, high linearity, high resolution, and high integration.