Abstract

The development of telecommunications electronics with low power and low mass will be significant for future deep-space communications. The design of a receiver for deep-space communication requires the receiver to be robust against frequency variations due to Doppler effect in addition to radiation tolerance and low-power consumption. This dissertation reports a very low-power differential-based phase-shift keying (PSK) receiver that is targeted at deep space and satellite communications, on both architectural and implementation levels. The power consumption of the PSK baseband circuit alone is less than 100 µW, which is significantly better than previously reported designs. Another major feature that has not been previously offered for PSK modulation is the use of 1-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with sub-sampling front-end. The receiver uses double differential detection with traditional PSK modulation in the baseband to eliminate the impact of Doppler shift. Furthermore, the baseband can be employed in IF-sampling and sub-sampling front-end. Both front-ends offer minimal power consumption and differ from many traditional ones by eliminating some existing problems such as DC offset, dc voltage drifts and 1/f noise. The receiver also incorporates digita