A Signal-Interleaving Complex Bandpass Sigma-Delta Converter

Complex or quadrature Sigma-Delta converters operate on complex signals, i.e. signals consisting of a real and an imaginary component, whereas conventional converters operate only on real signals. The advantage of complex signal processing in the discrete-time domain is that the entire sampling frequency bandwidth - not just half of it - is available, and that network zeros and poles can be placed anywhere without having to appear in complex conjugate pairs.

This paper demonstrates how these properties can be used to design complex bandpass Sigma-Delta converters with a better noise performance than conventional converters, and a new signal-interleaving switched-capacitor architecture is derived for these complex converters.