Ironing the Modulo Folds: Unlimited Sensing with 100x Bandwidth Expansion

Yuliang Zhu, Ruiming Guo, Ayush Bhandari

Session: General

Keywords: Unlimited Sampling, Analog-to-Digital Conversion, Bandwidth Expansion, Super-Resolution, Prony's Method.

TL;DR: We report a 100x bandwidth expansion in modulo ADCs by co-design of hardware and signal processing, supported by mathematical formalization, recovery guarantees, and hardware validation.

Abstract: The practical implementation of Shannon's sampling theorem using analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) involves an inescapable trade-off between dynamic range and digital resolution. The Unlimited Sensing Framework (USF) overcomes this fundamental limitation by leveraging a co-design of modulo folding in hardware with algorithmic unfolding (or ironing) in software. While recent years have seen progress on both hardware and algorithmic fronts, further technological advancements are needed to push the bandwidth limits of modulo ADC hardware. Can higher bandwidths be achieved through algorithms alone? In this paper, we take a computational sensing approach to enhance the operational capabilities of modulo ADCs by shifting the emphasis from precise, resource-intensive hardware to algorithmic solutions. As a result, we demonstrate a 100-fold bandwidth expansion beyond the modulo ADC's technical specifications. Our key contributions include: the mathematical formalization of the bandwidth expansion problem based on phenomenological observations of high-frequency non-linear effects, a sampling theorem that provides recovery guarantees for our algorithm, and hardware validation demonstrating the practical advantages of our method.

Submission Number: 117