A new broadcast format and receiver architecture for radio controlled clocks

A new broadcast format is presented for the atomic-clock time-code signal broadcast by the National Institute of Standards of Technology (NIST) from station WWVB in Fort Collins, Colorado. The new broadcast format, based on BPSK modulation that is added to the existing amplitude-modulation (AM), offers many new features and provides several orders of magnitude of improvement in reception robustness, without impacting existing AM receivers that are based on envelope-detection. Additionally, a digital receiver architecture, amenable to integration in a CMOS system-on-chip (SoC), is proposed, which relies on digital signal processing, thereby eliminating the need for the crystal filter and other passive components found in existing receivers.

[1]  Michael A. Lombardi,et al.  NIST Time and Frequency Services | NIST , 2002 .

[2]  Waleed Khalil,et al.  NEW IMPROVED SYSTEM FOR WWVB BROADCAST , 2012 .

[3]  Yong Hoon Lee,et al.  Frame synchronization in the presence of frequency offset , 2002, IEEE Trans. Commun..

[4]  Yong-Hoon Lee,et al.  A joint maximum likelihood approach to frame synchronization in presence of frequency offset , 2002, 2002 IEEE International Conference on Communications. Conference Proceedings. ICC 2002 (Cat. No.02CH37333).

[5]  P. Takis Mathiopoulos,et al.  Frame synchronization in frequency uncertainty , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Communications.

[6]  Marco Chiani,et al.  Noncoherent Frame Synchronization , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Communications.

[7]  Waleed Khalil,et al.  New Improved System for WWVB Broadcast | NIST , 2011 .