Sensitivity analysis of direct conversion receivers to Analog-to-Digital Converter performance

In this work, the sensitivity of QPSK direct conversion receivers to ADC performance is analyzed. The proposed receiver model with AWGN channel shows how the system BER is affected by major ADC non-idealities including quantization error, offset, 1/f noise, gain/phase error, sampling jitter, and I/Q channel cross-talk. It is shown that the receiver sensitivity to major ADC errors is strongly affected by the modulation scheme of the system. Furthermore, the proposed method can be simply extended to receivers using other modulation schemes such as GMSK or QAM.