On the theory of multiGigabit transceiver implementations

The analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is the fundamental bottleneck to scaling mostly digital communication transceiver architectures to multiGigabit speeds: high-precision, high-speed ADCs are too costly, too power-hungry, or simply not available. One possible approach to this problem is to use drastically lower ADC precision in the receiver. However, the insertion of a severe nonlinearity in the transceiver chain implies that we must comprehensively rethink signal processing for communication, which is largely based on linear models. After reviewing what Shannon theory tells us, we discuss recent results on demodulation, automatic gain control, and transmit precoding.