Analog-to-digital conversion the bottleneck for Software Defined Radio frontends

Multi-standard capability of current wireless equipment requires a major degree of complexity and flexibility of classical radio frontends. Wideband architectures in combination with software defined radio (SDR) technologies can considerably reduce the demands on the analog frontends. Consequently, analog-to-digital converters (ADC) with high sampling rates and large dynamic range are necessary. Even though current ADCs are improving steadily, they are still one of the limiting components in software defined receivers. This paper gives an overview of the state-of-the-art of analog-to-digital converters and dynamic range enhancement techniques like signal averaging or nonuniform quantization.