An Almost-All Digital Proximity Transceiver for Mars Surface Missions

This article presents a digital proximity transceiver for next the generation of small Mars robotic surface exploration missions operating at the deep space exploration UHF band (390–450 MHz). The developed transceiver adopts an almost all-digital architecture, except for a single variable gain pre-amplifier placed before the receiver ADC. All other functions of the transceiver (filtering, up-conversion, down-conversion) are implemented as digital signal processing circuitry. The transceiver highly oversamples the UHF band at a rate of 1280 MS/s allowing additional dynamic range to be obtained with modest bit-depth data converters (10-bit transmit and 7-bit receive). The transceiver expects an external baseband processor implemented in software or programmable logic for Channel-coding, Link and Network-layer operations. It also contains a stand-alone hailing function that allows it to wake up downstream avionics without requiring baseband processing when a hailing signal is received within a programmable bandwidth. The CMOS transceiver chip is implemented in a 65 nm CMOS technology and consumes a total power of 356 mW, not counting the need for an external III-V Low Noise Amplifier and Power Amplifier.