Blind estimation of unknown time delay in periodic non-uniform sampling: Application to desynchronized time interleaved-ADCs

Increasing the sampling rate of Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADC) is a main challenge in many fields and especially in telecommunications. Time-Interleaved ADCs (TI-ADC) were introduced as a technical solution to reach high sampling rates by time interleaving and multiplexing several low-rate ADCs at the price of a perfect synchronization between them. Indeed, as the signal reconstruction formulas are derived under the assumption of uniform sampling, a desynchronization between the elementary ADCs must be compensated upstream with an online calibration and expensive hardware corrections of the sampling device. Based on the observation that desynchronized TI-ADCs can be effectively modeled using a Periodic Non-uniform Sampling (PNS) scheme, we develop a general method to blindly estimate the time delays involved in PNS. The proposed strategy exploits the signal stationarity properties and thus is simple and quite generalizable to other applications. Moreover, contrarily to state-of-the-art methods, it applies to bandpass signals which is the more judicious application framework of the PNS scheme.