System design considerations of highly-integrated DAB receiver RF front-end

Nowadays the design of highly integrated single-chip digital audio broadcasting (DAB) receiver RF front-ends with excellent performance is very demanding and is still challenging. This paper presents a number of system issues and design considerations, which are involved in the design of such a front-end from the system point of view. These considerations include the proper choice of receiver front-end architecture, selection of intermediate frequency (IF) and local oscillator (LO) tuning range and their trade-offs, and critical system performance issues including sensitivity, noise figure, adjacent channel rejection, image rejection, dynamic range and AGC operation, carrier frequency offset, LO phase noise, non-linearities and selectivity and carrier to noise ratio (C/N). The main characteristics and performance of several reported DAB front-end ICs are tabulated.