ALPHACORE INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: AF162-007

Description

Alphacore proposes to design and implement the desired Analog to Information Processor (AIP) converter capable of directly converting RF (radio frequency) signals to information. Analog to feature/direct-information converters has been widely researched across various methods of implementation (including use of optics, magnetic field storage and so on). The hardware implementation of such systems has not yet been evaluated for RF (radio frequency) bandwidths due to the impact of circuit impairment on performance limitations. Although the AIP architectures facilitates slower ADCs, the signal encoding, typically performed by a mixer-like circuit, still occurs at the Nyquist frequency of the input to avoid aliasing. The jitter and aperture of this mixing stage limits the achievable AIF resolution. Alphacores solution to this problem is our innovative high input bandwidth and high linearity (>12 bits) non-uniform input sampler and filter which has a very low jitter at these Nyquist frequencies. Since the architecture do not require an ADC with sampling rate higher than 200Megasample per second (MS/s), the power savings will be significant, potentially more than 90%. The computational load for the DSP will also be reduced to a fraction as compared to existing solutions.