Date of Award

Summer 2014

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Technology

First Advisor

Walter D. Leon-Salas

Committee Member 1

Helen McNally

Committee Member 2

Suranjan Panigrahi

Abstract

The advances in the field of signal processing have led to the continuous increase in the bandwidth of signals. Sampling these signals becomes harder and harder due to the increased bandwidth. This brings in need for a complex high rate ADCs to meet the Nyquist rate which is the minimum rate to avoid aliasing. For a given increase in bandwidth, there has to be a corresponding increase in the sampling rate of ADC. This might not be possible in the near future at the current rate of increase in bandwidth. Hence, there is a need to replace the current Nyquist rate sampling method by a process that relaxes the requirements but still keeps the quality of signal reconstruction good .

Compressed sensing is a new technique in the field of signal acquisition. Compressed sensing allows a signal to be acquired below Nyquist rate if the signal is sparse in a given domain. Compressed sensing makes possible to acquire sparse signals at rates below Nyquist rate. Signals like audio and images are sparse and can be sampled at a rate below the Nyquist rate. The random demodulator (RD) is a hardware architecture that is used to implement compressed sensing. A direct implementation of compressed sensing in hardware requires several copies of the RD. To reduce the complexity fewer RDs can be used. Usage of fewer RDs comes at the cost of decreased signal reconstruction performance. The contribution of this thesis is about improving the efficiency of RD. First contribution of this thesis involves proposing a new RD architecture that improves signal reconstruction quality using a post-acquisition randomization step. The second contribution of this thesis is to develop a hardware platform for compressed sensing using field programmable analog arrays (FPAAs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). This platform can be used to test new architectures of RD in hardware.

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