All-digital reverse modulation architecture based carrier recovery implementation for GMSK and compatible FQPSK

A carrier recovery circuit implementation with an all-digital reverse modulation approach for coherent detection in the GSM/GMSK system as well as the GMSK compatible improved efficiency cross-correlated FQPSK system is presented. The proposed carrier recovery implementation utilizes all-digital reverse modulation circuit in a feedback loop to remove the modulated signal from the received intermediate frequency (IF) signal and to estimate the phase error of this carrier signal using a phase-locked loop (PLL). The digital reverse modulation approach avoids the multipliers required in an analog reverse modulation design, so that it can be implemented in a single chip FPGA. Hardware implementation of the coherent detection demonstrates that cross-correlated FQPSK is completely compatible with GMSK in the system performance and the receiver structure for GSM. Experimental performance evaluations show that the proposed carrier recovery circuit provides a Bit Error Rate (BER) performance within 0.3 dB in a non-linearly amplified channel corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise (AWCN) as compared with the simulated performance of the GSM/GMSK system