Self-Contained Dual-Input Interferometric Receiver for Paralleled-Multichannel Wireless Systems

In this paper, a self-contained dual-input receiver architecture based on the interferometric technique is proposed and demonstrated for the first time for paralleled-multichannel wireless systems. Different from conventional counterparts, the proposed receiver consists of dual-input RF channel paths, and only one sole hardware is used to realize frequency translation, i.e., the conversion to intermediate frequency (IF) band. Demodulated IF signals can be extracted from two output ports instead of four ports in legacy multiport systems, thereby further reducing circuit complexity, size, cost, and power consumption. A mathematical model of the receiver architecture is formulated and applied to examine its modes of operation. For the proof of concept, a dual-band and dual-polarized prototype RX frontend is designed and fabricated to validate the proposed architecture. The transmission and demodulation of multiple digital modulation signals including QPSK, 16-QAM, 32-QAM, and 64-QAM are successfully demonstrated experimentally. Those measured results confirm that the proposed receiver architecture achieves good and desired performances. Based on the proposed self-contained dual-input receiver architecture, a multiband and multifunction polarization-diversified wireless system featuring compact size, low-cost, and low-power consumption suitable for 5G, 6G, and beyond can be realized.