A low-power all-digital FSK receiver for space applications

A frequency-shift keying (FSK) receiver has been designed for deep space ap plications which exhibits potential for ultra low power performance. The re ceiver is based on a novel, almost all-digital architecture. It supports a wide range of data rates and is very robust against large and fast frequenc y offsets due to Doppler, The architecture utilizes subsampling and 1-bit d ata processing together with a discrete Fourier transform-based detection s cheme to enable power consumption dramatically lower than implementations r eported in literature. Novel and power-efficient algorithms are derived for frequency and timing tracking. Most of the power saving techniques are app licable to a variety of applications, but some are achieved by taking advan tage of the asymmetric power constraints for the receiver and the transmitt er as well as the absence of adjacent channel interferers. The worst-case b it-error rate (BER) performance of the receiver is just 2.5 dB below that o f the optimal uncoded noncoherent FSK receiver at a BER of 10(-6) and bette r for lower BERs.