Foundations of Digital Receiver Design

This badge certifies successful completion of a seminar series in digital receiver design, with a focus on the signal processing foundations and architectural components of modern digital communication systems.

Badge earners have demonstrated the ability to:

• Describe the complete architecture and functional flow of digital communication systems, from transmitter to receiver.

• Interpret and apply key modulation techniques such as BPSK and QPSK, and evaluate system performance through simulation-based analysis.

• Explain how noise, pulse shaping, and bandwidth constraints affect receiver design in the presence of AWGN channels.

• Analyze and compare error correction strategies—including soft decision decoding and Turbo Codes—within the context of Shannon's Limit.

• Calculate a basic link budget and understand the role of Automatic Gain Control (AGC) in system performance.

• Identify and describe the use of numerically controlled oscillators and matched filter outputs in synchronization and signal detection.

• Implement core concepts in symbol timing recovery and frequency/phase recovery under conditions of channel impairments and phase noise.

Verified Skills:

• Digital modulation and demodulation

• Signal representation and noise modeling

• AWGN channel and receiver filtering

• Forward error correction and decoding algorithms

• Symbol timing and frequency/phase synchronization

• Link budget analysis

• Communication system simulation

• System-level signal processing integration

Badge holders attended at least 80% of the seminar series.