Phase is Important: From Compensation and Calibration of Modulated Wideband Converter to Signal Reconstruction.

As a sub-Nyquist sampling structure based on compressed sensing (CS), modulated wideband converter (MWC) was proposed to overcome the sampling rate limitation of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) for wide spectral multiband signals. Different from ideal conditions when analyzing its theory, in practice, the MWC system is implemented with non-ideal devices. Due to this deviation between the ideal model and practical hardware, any imperfection of the analog device will lead to an imperfect signal reconstruction. Although the non-ideal factors can be compensated and calibrated, the conventional compensation and calibration methods easily introduce additional phase errors. This paper aims to evaluate the impact of those phase errors on signal reconstruction performance. We point out that phase errors deteriorate the normalized mean squared errors (NMSE) and even lead to incorrect support set recovery in serious cases. We thus propose a method using the SINC signal and DC signal to measure the MWC channel response which avoids the phase errors introduced in the compensation process. To verify this method, an MWC system and a measuring platform are implemented on hardware. The measurement results show that the recovery NMSE of − 13.09dB is achieved after being measured and compensated with an input SNR of 25.47dB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]