Detecting, channelizing, and characterizing radio frequency signals is a fundamental requirement for electronic warfare receivers as well as in commercial wireless applications where it is important to determine activity/inactivity in specified bands for spectral sharing and interference avoidance. Spectral sensing receivers are required to cover bandwidths in the GHz range and channelize signals into frequency bins in the kilo-hertz or mega-hertz range depending on the application. The difficulty is to detect, then determine spectral characteristics of multiple signals with varying power levels and signal characteristics in real time. A number of current Digital Wideband Spectral Sensing Receiver (DWSSR) architectures are based on the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT).
An alternative to the FFT based design is a Filter Bank (FB) DWSSR which will be pursued in this thesis. The FB DWSSR is a flexible design with low complexity and better performance when compared to the FFT based DWSSR.