Abstract
Meeting the pressing power and bandwidth requirements of modern communication systems requires the development of highly efficient reconfigurable transceivers. On the receiver side, we present a new class of reconfigurable receiver that utilizes random projections to balance the power-bandwidth tradeoff. Such random projection front-ends are ubiquitous and allow the use of sub-Nyquist ADCs. These systems utilize high speed DACs, typically found in transmitters, to generate high fidelity random signals. The emergence of RF-DACs, used for direct digital-to-RF synthesis, can be leveraged for random projection reconfigurable receivers. However, the need for high output power and linearity in both the transmitter and receiver DACs forces an evaluation of RF-DAC topologies with respect to drain efficiency. In this paper, the power efficiencies of several RF-DAC topologies are compared.