Power efficient adaptive M-QAM design using adaptive pipelined analog-to-digital converter

In broadband wireless applications, power consumption is one of the critical system parameters. It is important to achieve high spectral efficiency and power saving at the same time. For high spectral efficiency, adaptive M-QAM systems have been previously proposed, but the impact of the additional hardware components required to implement such systems have not been well studied. In this paper, we study the effect of adaptive M-QAM modems on hardware power consumption. This is followed by the description of a new architecture for low power ADC.