Design of a multi-channel and reconfigurable RF sampling GNSS receiver

Abstract

This paper describes the design of a multi-channel, multi-frequency and reconfigurable GNSS receiver based on RF sampling technique. The design of the receiver RF front-end consists on the determination of the required gain, noise figure and analog to digital converter (ADC) dynamic range and sampling frequency based on GNSS standards specifications. Then, the analysis of noise sources in RF sampling receiver allows specifying the ADC jitter and quantization noise limits. The proposed design methodology is applied to design GPS/GLONASS/GALILEO/COMPASS receiver. Sampling frequency selection is addressed for different scenarios and anti-aliasing filter specifications are derived. Then, appropriate discrete components are selected for the purpose of the construction of a hardware test platform. Refined modeling and advanced simulation of the proposed GNSS receiver on ADS software validate the design method and show the performances of the proposed GNSS receiver.