Arbitrary multiband overlay mixer apparatus and method for bandwidth multiplication.

摘要

An apparatus and method for splitting a wide band input signal (105) and overlaying multiple frequency bands on each path associated with one or more digitizers (170 to 176). All frequencies from the split signal on each path can be fed to a mixer (130 to 145). The local oscillator input of each mixer receives a sum (191 to 197) of signals, which can each be set to any arbitrary frequency, as long as an associated matrix determinant of coefficients is non-zero. Each oscillator signal is multiplied by a coefficient (a1 to d4), which can represent phase and magnitude, prior to summing the oscillator signals together. Each mixer mixes a combined signal (191 to 197) with the input, thereby generating a signal set (110 to 125) of multiple overlaid frequency bands. The digitized signals are processed to substantially reconstruct the original input signal. Thus, the wide band input signal is digitized using multiple individual digitizers. In particular, a system can support two wide band signals using four digitizers of narrower bandwidth.