We have proposed a new low-IF transceiver architecture to simultaneously achieve both a small chip area and good minimum input sensitivity. The distinctive point of the receiver architecture is that we replace the complicated high-order analog filter for channel selection with the combination of a simple low-order analog filter and a sharp digital band-pass filter. We also proposed a high-speed convergence AGC (automatic gain controller) and a demodulation block to realize the proposed digital architecture. For the transceiver, we further reduce the chip area by applying a new form of direct modulation for the VCO. Since conventional VCO direct modulation tends to suffer from variation of the modulation index with frequency, we have developed a new compensation technique that minimizes this variation, and designed the low-phase noise VCO with a new biasing method to achieve large PSRR (power-supply rejection ratio) for oscillation frequency. The test chip was fabricated in 0.35-µm BiCMOS. The chip size was 3 3 mm2; this very small area was realized by the advantages of the proposed transceiver architecture. The transceiver also achieved good minimum input sensitivity of -85 dBm and showed interference performance that satisfied the requirements of the Bluetooth standard.

A verification is made on the accuracy of Radar-AMeDAS precipitation, which represents hourly precipitation over the Japanese Islands and the surrounding sea area with a spatial resolution of 5km using data from 5cm conventional radars, 10cm Fujisan Radar, and Automated Meteorological Data Acquisition System (AMeDAS) raingauge network. By comparing with data from a very dense raingauge network of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, it is found that 1) Radar-AMeDAS precipitation shows good agreement if a positioning error of one pixel of 5km square is allowed 2) Radar-AMeDAS precipitation represents almost the average of raingauge measurements in the 5km square for most of the precipitation caused by a large scale disturbance, and 3) Radar-AMeDAS precipitation is close to the maximum raingauge measurement in the pixel when precipitation is extremely localized such as thunderstorms or showers. Radar-AMeDAS precipitations are compared also with AMeDAS measurements statistically with respect to the appearance rates, that is (total number of pixels where specific intensity is observed) / (total number of all pixels), for different precipitation intensities. The rate of Radar- AMeDAS precipitation shows excellent agreement with that of AMeDAS if radar echoes are observed at the altitude lower than 2km. Since Radar- AMeDAS precipitation on land sometimes represents the maximum of precipitation in a pixel for the purpose of unfailingly detecting extremely localized severe precipitation, it shows a high appearance rate at high precipitation intensity than AMeDAS, which is considered to represent statistically the average of a pixel. As a result, in estimating areal rainfall amounts, Radar- AMeDAS precipitation overestimates AMeDAS measurement by 8% at 5mm/h and by 12% at 40mm/h. Radar- AMeDAS precipitation over the sea, with no local calibration by AMeDAS and with little influence of orography, is 2% weaker in intensity than AMeDAS at 10mm/h, and 12% at 40mm/h.