Time delay estimation of cyclostationary signals on PCB using spectral correlation function

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to estimating delays of the cyclostationary signal propagating through tracks of the data bus of a printed circuit board (PCB). The signal path is described by the series of delays estimated using cyclostationary characteristics in the frequency domain. A brief overview of cyclostationarity phenomena is given alongside with the designed practical algorithm performing wideband estimation of the spectral correlation density of the signal. Delay estimations obtained with the proposed approach based on cyclic spectral correlation function are much closer to the values evaluated geometrically on planar scheme than delays calculated by means of well-known generalized cross-correlation algorithm (GCC). The proposed algorithm is verified by the results of experiments featuring FPGA board.