RF Circuits and Systems - RF Receiver Architectures

This course will provide an in depth teaching of radio-frequency receiver architectures.

The course covers fundamentals of radio-frequency receivers including direct-coversion, heterodyne, image-rejection, dual-downconversion architectures.

The course offers practical and insightful information about RF receivers

The case studies include WiFi receivers and cellular recievers.

The prerequist for this course is the previous Udemy courses offered by Prof. Payam Heydari on basic concepts in RF design and fundamentals of communication theory.

A radio-frequency transceiver comprising a receiver and a transmitter is the main system responsible for establishing communication between users of the communication system. This lecture focuses on the study and design of radio-frequency receivers. The course starts with an overview of important design specifications for both a transmitter and a receiver. Common specs such as frequency bands and channelization, data rate, type of modulation, transmitter output power and spectral mask, the transmitter EVM, receiver sensitivity, receiver input level, and receiver tolerance to blockers will be briefly discussed. The course then will provide an in-depth study of wireless receivers. Starting with bandpass representation of RF signals, the need for the quadrature downconversion to fully recover the signal is discussed. The course will then go over the concept of heterodyne architecture and investigates the problem of image in this architecture. The students will learn that a heterodyne receiver always faces a trade-off between channel selection and image rejection. Next, the widely used direct-conversion receiver architectures will be studied. The course provides a deep study of all issues in regard to the direct-conversion receiver including the local-oscillator leakage, the DC offset, even-order distortion, I/Q imbalance, and the impact of 1/f noise. Next, the image-reject architectures will be studied and a powerful graphical analysis is utilized to analyze these architectures. The course will go over the low-IF receivers and polyphase filters. Finally, the dual-quadrature downconversion receivers based on the concept of complex mixers will be studied. 

This course is (1) intended for aspiring design eeers who are seeking a career in RF design; (2) graduate students; and (3) senior-level undergraduate students.

HomePage:

https://www.udemy.com/course/rf_receiver_architectures/