Practical Modulo Sampling: Mitigating High-Frequency Components

TL;DR

This paper presents a practical hardware-based modulo sampling method that mitigates high-frequency components using an analog mixer and low-pass filter, enabling the use of realistic ADCs for reliable signal recovery.

Contribution

It introduces a hardware approach combining mixing and filtering to handle high-frequency artifacts, making modulo sampling feasible with standard ADCs in real-world applications.

Findings

Effective mitigation of high-frequency components with hardware filtering.

Successful hardware prototype demonstrating practical modulo recovery.

Robust recovery in the presence of quantization noise.

Abstract

Recovering signals within limited dynamic range (DR) constraints remains a central challenge for analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). To prevent data loss, an ADCs DR typically must exceed that of the input signal. Modulo sampling has recently gained attention as a promising approach for addressing DR limitations across various signal classes. However, existing methods often rely on ideal ADCs capable of capturing the high frequencies introduced by the modulo operator, which is impractical in real-world hardware applications. This paper introduces an innovative hardware-based sampling approach that addresses these high-frequency components using an analog mixer followed by a Low-Pass Filter (LPF). This allows the use of realistic ADCs, which do not need to handle frequencies beyond the intended sampling rate. Our method eliminates the requirement for high-specification ADCs and demonstrates that the resulting samples are equivalent to those from an ideal high-spec ADC. Consequently, any existing modulo recovery algorithm can be applied effectively. We present a practical hardware prototype of this approach, validated through both simulations and hardware recovery experiments. Using a recovery method designed to handle quantization noise, we show that our approach effectively manages high-frequency artifacts, enabling reliable modulo recovery with realistic ADCs. These findings confirm that our hardware solution not only outperforms conventional methods in high-precision settings but also demonstrates significant real-world applicability.