A Novel Circuit Architecture for Generating Narrow Pulses via Spectrum Stitching

摘要

In this paper, a novel circuit architecture is proposed to generate narrow pulses with high flexibility and without high cost. The desired narrow pulse signal is obtained via combining multiple sub-signals. The bandwidth of individual sub-signals is much smaller than the bandwidth of the desired pulse signal, and thus the sub-signals can be generated by low-speed digital-to-analog converters (DACs). When the sub-signals are combined, their spectra are stitched into the wideband spectrum of narrow pulse signal. Theoretically, arbitrary pulse waveforms can be synthesized through the proposed & x201C;spectrum stitching & x201D; technique without resorting to high-speed DACs, as long as the sub-signals are synchronized among each other in time. A prototype circuit is implemented to verify the fundamental scheme of the proposed & x201C;spectrum stitching & x201D; technique. The experimental results demonstrate that, Dirichlet pulses with temporal width of approximately 4 ns are successfully synthesized through combining the outputs of a regular 80-MHz waveform generator. In addition, numerical and experimental results indicate that, the proposed & x201C;spectrum stitching & x201D; circuit architecture is quite insensitive to various practical errors.