Revisiting spurious-free dynamic range of communication receivers

The spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) is commonly used as a measure of dynamic range for the radio frequency and microwave front-end receivers. Although well defined in narrow-band systems, the definition becomes less clear in wide-band systems, when the nonlinearity is memoryless and the the noise figure is frequency dependent. To generalize the SFDR to wide-band systems, a meaningful physical interpretation of the conventional two-tone test is first developed. Based on this interpretation, the upper bound of the wide-band SFDR is obtained by applying a multitone test, while the lower bound is computed using the effective noise figure. The multitone test in both the memoryless and memory nonlinear Volterra systems is considered. A practical measurement technique to characterize the Volterra kernel is also provided. A realistic example based on a low noise amplifier shows a significant difference between the conventional and wide-band SFDR values. In this example, our results suggest that the use of two tones widely separated in frequency to model the interferers provides sufficiently accurate results compared to a multitone approximation.