High speed receiver designs based on surface acoustic wave devices

The principles of operation and several types of surface acoustic wave devices are reviewed. One device, the interdigital transducer device, can accomplish matched filtering for complex bandwidth-efficient phase modulations. Data speeds in excess of 120 Mbits/s are accomplished with existing thin film lithography. Filters are cheap and small, and show little mismatch to the desired response. A number of receiver designs are proposed that are based on these filters. A bank-of-matched-filters approach seems superior to the Viterbi algorithm at high speeds.