Symbol Recovery Circuit design for deep-space MARS receiver using SOI technology

Abstract

The motivation for this thesis is to present a design of a symbol recovery circuit for a receiver on a planetary lander vehicle, which would communicate with a low orbit satellite. With the development of advanced propulsion mechanisms and autonomous machines, there has been a great revival of interest in exploration of nearby planets. The Mars rover project aims to land an autonomous vehicle on the surface of Mars, which would be controlled via a datalink with an orbiting satellite. The design of a communication system for this presents a number of issues, including Doppler resistance, Radiation tolerance and minimal power consumption.

The design of the receiver uses a new modulation technique known as Double Differential Phase Shift Keying, which provides the inherent robustness to Doppler while consuming low power. A symbol recovery circuit is an essential part of the receiver and extracts clock information from received data which is then used to demodulate data. The symbol recovery circuit for the rover needs to handle multiple bit rates while consuming minimal power. The design of the receiver on a system level and the symbol recovery circuit is described in the thesis. The system was modeled using MATLAB simulink, designed in Verilog/VHDL, synthesized using Synopsys design compiler and converted to SOI using Cadence.