Abhijit Chatterjee and both his present and former Ph.D. students – Nicholas Tzou, Debesh Bhatta, Barry J. Muldrey Jr., Thomas Moon, Xian Wang, and Hyun Choi — have been chosen for the 2015 Journal of Electronic Testing: Theory and Applications (JETTA)/IEEE Test Technology Technical Council Best Paper Award.

A professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Chatterjee and his team will receive this award for their paper, “Low Cost Sparse Multiband Signal Characterization Using Asynchronous Multi-Rate Sampling: Algorithms and Hardware,” at the 2016 International Test Conference, to be held November 15-17 in Fort Worth, Texas. The paper was published in the February 2015 issue of JETTA, volume 31, number 1, pages 85-98.  

Characterizing the spectrum of sparse wideband signals of high-speed devices efficiently and precisely is critical in high-speed test instrumentation design. Recently proposed sub-Nyquist rate sampling systems have the potential to significantly reduce the cost and complexity of sparse spectrum characterization; however, due to imperfections and variations in hardware design, numerous implementation and calibration issues have arisen and need to be solved for robust and stable signal acquisition. Synchronization of the test input signal with the test acquisition system is a major problem requiring specialized design effort.

In the research presented in this paper, a low-cost and low-complexity hardware architecture and associated asynchronous (incoherent) multi-rate sub-Nyquist rate sampling based algorithms for sparse spectrum characterization were developed. The proposed scheme can be implemented with a single ADC or with multiple ADCs as in multi-channel or band-interleaved sensing architectures. Compared to other sub-Nyquist rate sampling methods, the proposed hardware scheme can achieve wideband sparse spectrum characterization with minimum cost and calibration effort.

Hardware prototypes built using off-the-shelf components demonstrate that high-speed signals can be acquired using incoherent undersamplng with sampling clocks running at fractions of the Nyquist rate. Work is under way to extend these techniques for acquisition of high-speed test signals in the 20 GHz to 60GHz range using incoherent undersampling combined with bandwidth interleaving.