Digital receivers have revolutionized electronic systems for a variety of applications including communications, data acquisition and signal processing. This handbook shows how digital receivers, the fundamental building block for software radio, can replace conventional analog receiver designs, offering significant benefits in performance, density and cost.

In order to fully appreciate the benefits of digital receivers, a conventional analog receiver system will be compared to its digital receiver counterpart, highlighting similarities and differences.

The inner workings of the digital receiver will be explored with an in-depth description of the internal structure and the devices used. Finally, some actual receiver system implementations and available off-the-shelf board level digital receiver products for embedded systems will be described.