Digital Receiver for Radiometer

A recent TDE activity has designed, manufactured and tested a 20% smaller and 80% more efficient digital receiver chip for radiometers, using a complete SiGe integrated circuit with RF/IF downconverter and an A/D converter.

The main target of the activity was to reduce the mass, size and consumption of radiometer instruments targeting synthetic aperture radiometers that require a large amount of antennas and receivers.

By reducing the mass of the digital receiver for radiometer chip (a reduction of 100 to 200gr (10-20%) of receiver mass was achieved just by replacing the mixer and IF sections with the new chip), many more radiometry, GNSS and antenna instruments and elements can be included on missions.

To test the chip, a radiometer test board was built with two RF/IF channels and ADC’s. The RF front end (switch, LNA and BPF) of two LICEF3 units was used to provide low NF and rejection in front of the RF/IF radiometer test board.

The designed chip is suitable for covering several scientific applications at L-band, including radiometry and GNSS reflectometry instruments. The chip has been designed to cover the whole frequency band and the IF filtering and gain can be reconfigured to target different applications.

Now, the developed DiReRa chip set (RF down-converter and A-D –converter and multiplexer) is ready for EM receiver development.

This relates to TDE activity T106-305ET/ 4000117751.