Large dynamic range data acquisition system for time-domain electromagnetic interference (TDEMI) measurement receiver

Electromagnetic interference (EMI) measurement is essential in wireless communications to avoid both performance degradation and serious fault failures. In this paper, we present the design of an acquisition system for a time-domain EMI measurement receiver intended for monitoring potential EMI. The platform consists of both hardware and software systems. The hardware system is constructed using a modular design method and contains a conditioning module, a data acquisition and processing module, and a clock generation module. The software system provides an interactive interface for device operation and offers an automatic sampling/processing procedure that is developed on a slot 0 controller. An additional outstanding feature of the proposed system is its high dynamic range. We propose a novel multi-stage architecture and a data reconstruction algorithm that are combined to achieve large dynamic range acquisition. The proposed acquisition architecture breaks through the dynamic range limitations of conventional analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) on a significant scale. The implemented system is able to capture an analog waveform with a 300 MHz bandwidth and a 1 GS/s sampling rate. The experimental results show that the maximum dynamic range achieved is 96.43 dB, which is far greater than the single ADC dynamic range of 52 dB.