Current and upcoming communication and sensing technologies require ever larger bandwidths. Channel bonding can be utilized to extend a receiver's instantaneous bandwidth beyond a single converter's Nyquist limit. Two potential joint front-end and converter design approaches are theoretically introduced, realized and evaluated in this paper. The Xilinx RFSoC platform with its 5 GSa/s analog to digital converters (ADCs) is used to implement both a hybrid coupler based in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) sampling and a time-interleaved sampling approach along with channel bonding. Both realizations are demonstrated to be able to reconstruct instantaneous bandwidths of 5 GHz with up to 49 dB image rejection ratio (IRR) typically within 4 to 8 dB the front-ends' theoretical limits.
@article{arxiv.2210.07821,
title = {Receiver Bandwidth Extension Beyond Nyquist Using Channel Bonding},
author = {Sebastian Giehl and Carsten Andrich and Michael Schubert and Maximilian Engelhardt and Alexander Ihlow},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.07821},
year = {2024}
}