Advanced component architectures for detection and communication systems

Future military and commercial communication systems and sensors require a new generation of circuits with cognitive, deployable, agile, versatile, survivable and sustainable capabilities. These characteristics can be achieved by systems that are autonomous and have the ability to reconfigure in real-time so they adapt to unexpected changes to the electromagnetic environment or to signals with arbitrary bandwidths. Cognitive matching is a key feature in this architecture. To be able to match in real time and under dynamic operating conditions, the architecture of the matching network has to be designed to provide continuous adaptivity to the incoming signal in order to ensure proper reception and decoding. The requirement to accommodate arbitrary-bandwidth signals, poses significant challenges to traditional time-invariant matching networks because of the gain-bandwidth restrictions and their inability to ensure a linear phase response for broadband pulse-based inputs. To address this need a time-variant matching network architecture that is incorporating high-Q passives is particularly suited for pulse-based systems.