t IMS 2010 in Anaheim, the fi rst Amplifi er Sequenced Hybrid (ASH) Receiver Student Design Contest was held. The contest was organized by MTT-2 Microwave Acoustics and MTT-16 Microwave Systems and supported by the companies Rohde & Schwarz and TDK-EPC. MTT-2 monitors developments in microwave surface-and bulk-acoustic-wave devices and their impact on microwave systems. The TC on microwave systems, MTT-16, is chartered with investigating, evaluating, and communicating new and/or peripheral technologies for microwave and millimeter-wave system applications.The goal of the contest was the design and optimization of an ASH receiver with surface-acoustic-wave filters, switched amplifiers, a power detector, and timing circuits. The design was judged on a figure-of-merit based on the power consumption and the sensitivity of the receiver. The students had to perform a design and optimization of a complex microwave system, from choosing transistor operating points to bit-error-rate analysis of the received signal.Three teams from Vienna, Austria; Kiel, Germany; and Cologne, Germany, participated with highly different designs and approaches. There was plenty of time at the IMS to explain the measurement setup, perform measurements with many different settings, and measure the highest sensitivity for each design. The winning design had an impressive 2108 dBm sensitivity, a power consumption of only 4.07 mW, and a figure of merit (FOM) of 296.8.
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Amplifier Sequenced Hybrid Receiver■ Christian Musolff, Andreas Neuberger, and Rainer Kronberger student design competition on ASH receiver design, sponsored by MTT-16 and MTT-2, was held during the IMS 2010 in Anaheim. This article is intended to outline the task and the outcome of the competition and to provide an insight in the development of our submission.The task was to design, construct, and measure an ASH Receiver at a frequency of 433.92 MHz, with the goal of achieving the lowest power consumption while providing the highest sensitivity. Performance was evaluated by a figure of merit, which was defined by FOM = 2 (Sensitivity 1 20 * log (dc power consumption)).Sensitivity was defined by the minimum input signal level, which results in a bit error rate of 10 -3 , while receiving a pseudorandom amplitude shift keying (ASK) modulated data signal at a data rate of 115.2 kB/s and a modulation index of 0.9 [1]. In addition to that, it was specified that a strong adjacent interferer, which will be out-of-band but 50 dB stronger than the actual data signal, will be present during the measurement. Surface acoustic wave (SAW) components for the implementation of the receiver were provided by Epcos [2].
Principle of Operation and MotivationWithin the scope of this article, we can only give a brief overview about the theory of the ASH receiver. (For a more comprehensive view on the ASH architecture, see the original paper by Darrell L. Ash [3], published in 1995.) Figure 1 illustrates the basic principle of operation. The incident RF signal is preselected by a SAW input filter, ampli...
