Intentional Aliasing Method to Improve Sub-Nyquist Sampling System

A modulated wideband converter (MWC) has been introduced as a sub-Nyquist sampler that exploits a set of fast alternating pseudo random (PR) signals. Through parallel analog channels, an MWC compresses a multiband spectrum by mixing it with PR signals in the time domain, and acquires its sub-Nyquist samples. Previously, the ratio of compression was fully dependent on the specifications of PR signals. That is, to further reduce the sampling rate without information loss, faster and longer-period PR signals were needed. However, the implementation of such PR signal generators results in high power consumption and large fabrication area. In this paper, we propose a novel aliased modulated wideband converter (AMWC), which can further reduce the sampling rate of MWC with fixed PR signals. The main idea is to induce intentional signal aliasing at the analog-to-digital converter (ADC). In addition to the first spectral compression by the signal mixer, the intentional aliasing compresses the mixed spectrum once again. We demonstrate that AMWC reduces the number of analog channels and the rate of ADC for lossless sub-Nyquist sampling without needing to upgrade the speed or the period of PR signals. Conversely, for a given fixed number of analog channels and sampling rate, AMWC improves the performance of signal reconstruction.