Advantages and Disadvantages of Homodyne Receiver

This page covers Advantages and Disadvantages of Homodyne Receiver. It mentions Homodyne receiver advantages or benefits and Homodyne receiver disadvantages or drawbacks.

What is Homodyne Receiver?

Introduction:
Homodyne receiver does not use any RF mixer for conversion of modulated RF signal to baseband I/Q signals. The baseband signals are at zero frequencies.

The figure-1 depicts Homodyne Receiver architecture. Homodyne receiver uses LO (Local Oscillator) frequency of same value as received signal frequency.
Refer Homodyne Vs Heterodyne Receiver>>.

The figure-2 depicts IQ demodulator. As shown it converts modulated RF signal to baseband I and Q signals. Here W0 equals 2*π*F0 where in F0 equals Fc (Carrier Frequency) of received modulated RF signal.

Benefits or advantages of Homodyne Receiver

Following are the benefits or advantages of Homodyne Receiver:
➨It uses same frequency for LO as transmit RF frequency for conversion to zero baseband I/Q signal frequency. Hence it is very simple architecture.
➨The RF components such as LOs, RF mixers and filters are not needed like heterodyne receiver architecture. Hence cost of the homodyne receiver is less compare to heterodyne receiver.

Drawbacks or disadvantages of Homodyne Receiver

Following are the disadvantages of Homodyne Receiver:
➨Homodyne receiver suffers from LO leakage. It should be as low as possible in order to retrieve baseband I/Q signals at zero frequency.

Also refer advantages and disadvantages of Heterodyne and Super heterodyne receiver >>.