Contaminating Signals in Severe Nonlinearities

Although the signals that eventually produce the desired system outputs do not usually encounter severe nonlinearities, we must understand the effects of such processes because other important system signals do. A frequently encountered severe nonlinearity is in the LO path of a frequency converter. Large signals and spurs that accompany them can get into the signal path by various processes and noise figure can also be affected. Fortunately, these severe nonlinearities have common features that provide a way for us to analyze their important system effects.