Design and implementation of a fully integrated compressed-sensing signal acquisition system

Compressed sensing (CS) is a topic of tremendous interest because it provides theoretical guarantees and computationally tractable algorithms to fully recover signals sampled at a rate close to its information content. This paper presents the design of the first physically realized fully-integrated CS based Analog-to-Information (A2I) pre-processor known as the Random-Modulation Pre-Integrator (RMPI) [1]. The RMPI achieves 2GHz bandwidth while digitizing samples at a rate 12.5× lower than the Nyquist rate. The success of this implementation is due to a coherent theory/algorithm/hardware co-design approach. This paper addresses key aspects of the design, presents simulation and hardware measurements, and discusses limiting factors in performance.