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.